Convergence
by pyrotorch246
Summary: Nearly one hundred years after the Battle of the Ark, a recovering humanity makes a discovery that will change their view of the galaxy.
1. Prelude: Silence of the Void

_Prelude: Silence of the Void_

The blackness of space is eternal. The distant flickering lights of far off stars are no match for the all devouring void.

Even the light of closer stars is a paltry thing, incapable of illumination beyond their home system.

That which is seen, and that which remains unseen-the eternal duality of space.

Sometimes, the weak light of a single star is enough to usher that which was unseen into the realm of the seen. It happens in a thousand systems, or a million, on a regular basis. Whether these events happen at the same time is impossible to tell, for time is a fickle dimension, immaterial and flexible. In the streams of time, there is no such thing as an impartial observer.

Occasionally, things do happen together, in defiance of all of probability. Here, as though to spite the uncounted miles that span the distance between them, two stars rise.

The first casts its rays upon a planet of the dead. There are ruined cities, victims of the unrelenting throes of time. As the sun crests the horizon, the towering buildings are thrown into stark relief, their shadows reaching of the ground like a thousand fingers.

Above the planet, the light strikes something else. It is hard, angular, and battered. One end is open to space, the edges sheared away cleanly by some unimaginable force.

Here, on a broken wreck above a dead planet, the silence is that of a tomb.

Elsewhere, the other sun rises. It showcases a planet free from the scars of war that decorate so many others.

The people of the planet bear memories of a war a century gone. With time, the scars faded, but some things cannot be forgotten, and fewer still forgiven.

It is a jewel in space, a marble in the sky, the crowning achievement of a race.

Other planets had been settled longer, boasted greater cities, and incomparable natural beauty, but this planet was unique.

A cluster of lights drifted through the darkness, making their way toward the planet.

Here, at the pride of hundred worlds, the silence is that of anticipation.

A/N: I know, it's short. That's just my style for this sort of opening. I have most of the next chapter written, so expect that soon (Though it may be longer than I'd like, since I'll be out of town for a while).


	2. A Cluster of Stars

_Chapter One: A Cluster of Stars  
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[13:45 Zulu [06:45 Local], June 6, 2649 (Military Calendar)/

UNSC _Ready In The Night_/

High Orbit over Shanxi [Colony 138-A] Shanxi System]

Captain Hood had earned his eagles fighting far from Shanxi. Even after nearly a hundred years, the UNSC skirmished regularly with Jiralhanae and Kig-yar ships which refused to admit the war was over. Hood had spent most of his career fighting on the outer edges of UNSC space, and sitting over Shanxi was not what he had envisioned for his first command.

Shanxi was the farthest from Earth of the UNSC's colonies, but it was unique in that it was as far from the conflict zone as it was possible to get.

Shanxi was a frontline outpost, however. It was simply a different frontline. When the Charon relay had been discovered, barely thirty years after the war, humanity had begun to colonize outwards through it, settling new planets for those who did not want to live on the terraformed balls of glass that served as a reminder of the war. So Shanxi was on the frontlines of exploration.

A week and a half ago, an expedition had left to open a newly discovered relay. They were running late, and Hood was worried.

Normally, a relay opening expedition simply surveyed the system that the relay led too and returned, a task that rarely took more than three days. Even accounting for slipspace transit time between systems, the Styx Expedition was two days overdue.

New relays were none of Hood's business. He was assigned to Task Force 212, charged with defense of Shanxi. Missing ships weren't Hood's business either-rightfully, that headache belonged to Commodore Shipley.

That didn't make him any less worried. Relay expeditions did not run late, since the length of slipspace travel time was well known, and relay transit itself did was instantaneous. A ship, or group of ships running late meant some sort of problem, and out on the fringe any problem was enough to have the officers of TF 212 concerned.

"Captain?" The slightly nervous voice belonged to Ensign Carter, fresh from the academy on Reach, and showing it. As far as Hood could tell, Carter hadn't seen action on midshipman cruises, and his constant nervousness was a symptom of not knowing what he could face.

"What is it, Ensign?" Hood made sure his own reply was perfectly calm and relaxed, although he was feeling the tension caused by the missing ships himself.

"The Commodore is calling a meeting of all the ship captains. I took the liberty of routing the communication to the conference room, sir."

"Thank you, Ensign," The initiative Carter showed took Hood by surprise, making him revise his opinion of the Ensign. The _Ready In The Night_ had an AI, like all UNSC ships, but it was standard practice to let the comms officer handle all incoming traffic if the ship wasn't at battle stations. Miller would have taken the same actions as Cater, but coming from Carter, it was unexpected. 

"XO, you have the conn." Hood left the bridge behind to the sound of his exec's traditional answer: "Aye sir, I have the conn."

Even cruisers, which were luxurious by destroyer standards and practically palatial by frigate standards, were pressed for space. To make up for this, rooms often had multiple functions. In this case, the main room of the Captain's Cabin housed both a desk for working and a table for hosting guests, the latter of which also doubled as a holotank and comms interface for ship to ship conferences.

The rest of TF 212 was already gathered in their own respective conference rooms, and visible to all of the others. The hologram of Commodore Shipley was projected at the head of the table while the various commanders of TF 212 filled the rest of the spaces.

"Ladies and Gentlemen," Commodore Shipley began as soon as Hood arrived, "we have a problem.

"As you are already aware, the Styx expedition is overdue. Normally, this would be a minor matter, since we know where they were and where they should be, making finding them relatively simple. However, something else has come up. Seven minutes ago, long range sensors tied into the Shanxi relay reported a mass transit. A group of fifteen ships passed through the relay at 13:38 Zulu, more than twice as many ships as were a part of the Styx Expedition. None of the ships were broadcasting UNSC or Sangheili IFF codes, and their designs are unknown.

"This is a first contact scenario. The ships are moving headed in system, with an estimated ETA of thirteen minutes. Until we receive information to the contrary, I am assuming that the aliens are hostile and responsible for the disappearance of the Styx expedition. We'll be deploying to protect the planet. I want the _Tharsis_, _Iroquois_, and the _Glasglow Kiss_ screening the Cruisers. The frigates will observe from the edge of the system, and in the event of defeat, they will report back to Earth.

Shipley paused for a moment, before resuming. "We're operating on the assumption that these aliens are hostile. There is the possibility, however, that that assumption is wrong. You will not fire until fired upon, or until I give the order. Regardless, all ships of Task Force 212 are now operating under the confines of the Cole Protocol. Any questions?"

The captains of TF 212's ships looked back at Shipley, silently. Every one of them had fought the Covenant Remnant during their careers, and every one of them was ready to fight and die in the defense of the UNSC.

"Good. General Williams has been informed, so we've done what we can. Shipley out." The Commodore's image vanished from the table, followed by the rest of TF 212. In their place was a man wearing an anachronistic US Army uniform, who waited patiently for Hood to speak.

After a second, of staring into space, Hood looked back towards the holotank. "Miller, bring the ship to battle stations."

"Aye, Captain." As the AI responded to Hood, klaxons sounded throughout the _Ready In the Night_, the harsh sound they produced sending the crew scrambling to their battle stations. Off duty marines rushed to the armories, while the on duty security contingents began to take up positions guarding strategic bulkheads and compartments. Sailors began the elaborate drill of moving to their own battle stations, prepping the ship to fight, and releasing the manual interlocks that Miller was unable to override.

Hood himself descended from his quarters to the bridge, where his command crew was waiting at their assigned positions. Being called to battle stations during a routine cruise in the disputed zone was expected, but being called to battle stations while assigned to protect a remote colony on the far side of UNSC territory from Brute space was practically unheard of, and left the bridge crew slightly unnerved. They did their best not to show it as Hood walked down the bridge to Carter's station, but their tension was unmistakable, compared to their usual competent calmness.

"Ensign, bring up the 1MC, all circuits." Carter jumped slightly as Hood broke the silence that had descended upon the bridge before complying, activating the loudspeaker system across the entire ship. Once he was finished, he turned to Hood and nodded, letting him know that the system was ready, and that anything he said would be broadcast to the entire crew.

"Attention all hands! We are preparing to engage an unknown force that transited the Shanxi Relay at 13:38 Zulu. We don't know what our enemy is capable of, so be alert. That is all." He turned to address the bridge holotank, "Miller, you have control of point defense and EW. Lieutenant Ramirez, come about to heading zero three two and bring us into formation with the rest of the task force. Lieutenant Jaeger, start charging the MAC gun, and ready the Bowman Missile Pods for launch." He paused for a moment, debating his next order, before turning to Lieutenant Taylor, "Taylor, I want half the Saber 2's launched, and forming a screening element with the destroyers. Keep the rest on alert five."

With all the orders given, there was nothing to do but wait. TF 212 was in formation on the system elliptic, facing in the direction of the Shanxi Relay, which was considerably further out from the system's star, Shanxi Alpha, than the rest of its planets. The unknown ships were heavily blue-shifted and coming in at faster than light speeds, so their approach vector was visible to both the naked eye and the scanning systems of the UNSC ships, who had planted themselves directly in the path of the oncoming force. For the men and women of TF 212, the wait would be brief.

The unknown ships decelerated, adopting a formation similar to that of TF 212, with smaller craft in front, and began to close with the fighters and destroyers that made up the UNSC frontline.

On the bridge of the _Ready In The Night_, Hood waited patiently for the unknown force to close to engagement range. Commodore Shipley had transmitted a request for identification when the ships had decelerated to combat speeds, but they had not responded, and Shipley had ordered TF 212 to fire when the ships closed reached the maximum range of the two cruisers that were a part of the task force.

"Captain," Hood looked away from his master plot towards Miller's holotank, "Judging by the disposition of the enemy units, their force is composed primarily of light combatants, either frigates or destroyers, with five heavier combatants to back them up. All of their ships are significantly smaller than our own, and likely more maneuverable, but will be able to sustain less overall damage than any of the UNSC ships present."

"Thank you, Miller," Hood responded, "Is that everything?"

"No, sir. They will reach our maximum range in thirty seconds from now. I am displaying a countdown on the master plot."

The numbers clicked downwards steadily, drawing the attention of all of the bridge crew who were not immediately occupied. At fifteen seconds, Hood had Miller double check the firing solutions Jaeger had input. At five seconds he ordered Jaeger to prepare to fire.

When the timer reached zero, the UNSC fleet committed itself to action and Hood ordered Jaeger to fire. In the hundred years since the Human-Covenant War, there had been massive improvements in weaponry of all types, largely due to collaboration between the UNSC and the newly formed Sangheili Empire. Amongst these were improved MAC cannons, which fired ferric-tungsten rounds at a hundred kilometers a second, nearly three times that of war-era MAC Cannons. Due to the prevalence of energy shields, which the UNSC had adopted from the Sangheili, the MAC cannons also incorporated a design that had first been tested by the _Pillar of Autumn_ during the Battle of Reach. The cannons were fitted with magnetic recyclers and extra capacitors, allowing them to fire several times in rapid succession, which enabled them to breach shields and damage the actual target.

13:59 UNSC standard time, June 6, 2649, would go down in history as Zero Hour of the Second Contact war. Each of the three destroyers and both of the cruisers in TF 212 fired the MAC cannons simultaneously. The hostile light combatants were first into the fray, and the first to come under fire. The UNSC ships had fired at three million kilometers, which would give their rounds less than thirty seconds flight time when the speed of the hostile ships was accounted for.

Thirty seconds was enough time for a ship to dodge out of the way of an incoming projectile, provided it had adequate warning. The oncoming ships did not have the benefit an advance warning, but they had sensors of their own. Of the five MAC cannons that fired, only three hit their intended targets. Two frigate analogs shattered under the impact, while the third, a larger ship, reeled as its bow was snapped off by a glancing hit from a MAC round that had expended itself on the ship's shields.

Bowman missiles, which had been launched simultaneously with the MAC cannons, struck the hostile ships seconds later. The Mark 3 Bowman Anti-Ship Missile was the successor to the Archer missile of the Human-Covenant war, and, much like its predecessor, each individual warhead was capable of a mission kill on an unshielded warship. The other major similarity that the Bowman shared with the Archer was the mass launch tactic that the UNSC employed when facing shielded enemies, expending hundreds of missiles per engagement.

Point defense clusters on the enemy ships destroyed most of the Bowmans, and the shielding took care of the rest for the combat capable ships that remained. The ships that had been damaged by the MAC rounds possessed neither point defenses nor shielding. All three were gutted completely by nuclear explosions, leaving nothing behind by expanding clouds of debris.

The UNSC followed up its initial advantage with fighter strikes. All UNSC ships were equipped with Saber 2 fighters, though the entirety of TF 212's fighter compliment was less than that of a frontline carrier. Here, however, they found their match. The opposing force had deployed a limited number of fighters of its own, and their greater maneuverability allowed them to match the heavily armed and armored Sabers in individual dogfights. Weight of numbers was in favor of the UNSC fighters, and a number of them broke though, quickly closing with the enemy combatants. They began strafing runs against the lighter ships, only to be torn apart as the frigates turned their main guns and point defense lasers against them.

Hood watched the points that represented the fighters disappear one by one on his plot. The enemy was reeling after the first strike, but he felt _Ready In The Night_ buckle under him as it received concentrated return fire from the enemy's cruisers.

"Shields are down. Compartments twelve and thirteen have been breached." Hood relaxed ever so slightly at Miller's report. Twelve and thirteen were forward compartments that had were nonessential to combat, so they had been cleared of personnel and vented before the fighting began. His ship had taken a hit, but no one had been killed—something he knew couldn't last.

"Miller, direct engineering to bring the reactor to a hundred and fifteen percent and divert all nonessential power to recharging the shields." Hood knew he had to act quickly, as an unshielded warship was easy prey. "Then transmit all of our readings on the enemy to the frigates. I want—"

Hood never got a chance to finish his sentence as the _Ready In The Night_ came under concentrated fire from the opposing force. One lucky round penetrated the heavy armor belt around the reactor and destroyed the cooling systems, while another passed through the damaged forward compartments and struck the bridge. Seconds after Hood died, the overworked fusion reactor went critical, exploding in a vast, incandescent sphere that took the ship with it.

To the men and women on the planet below, the dying ships of Task Force 212 looked like a newborn cluster of stars in the dawn light.

A/N Sorry this took so long—I meant to have it up well before this, but real life has a nasty tendency to rear its ugly head just when I'm starting something new. I'm going to do my best to stick to a policy of updates once a week from here. Hopefully, one should be up next Friday.

I do have a beta, which slows the process down a bit (not much), but trust me when I say that the end product is superior to beta-less work.

Also, for those who are picky about details—the halo universe has all sorts of numbers, such as muzzle velocity and other helpful facts (say, armor thickness of a given UNSC ship class). The Mass Effect universe has an extensive codex, but to the extent of my knowledge, the only numbers we're ever given are for a dreadnought main gun in the "Deadliest Son Of A Bitch IN SPACE!" speech from ME2. That means that there aren't going to be a lot of hard numbers, since I want to avoid making things up. (And none of the ships in this chapter were dreadnoughts, so I couldn't even use the numbers I had.) Should anyone stumble upon hard weapons facts from ME, feel free to let me know.

-PT246


	3. From the Black

_Chapter Two: From the Black_

[07:00 Zulu [00:00 Local], June 11, 2649 [Military Calendar]/

Xin Taiyuan/

Shanxi [Colony 138-A], Shanxi System]

Xin Taiyuan did not sleep. Multiple detonations shook the capital of Shanxi Colony, as they had for each of the past five days and nights.

The origins of the blasts varied. Many of the smaller explosions were joined by rapid bursts of gunfire, as General William's tenacious army troopers fought a guerrilla campaign against the occupying aliens. They struck quickly, emerging out of the night to ambush patrols, before vanishing again.

The reason for speed was twofold—the soldiers had multiple targets to strike in a given night, and allowing a patrol to call reinforcements compromised their plans. The second reason, however, was what was on the mind of William's men when they attacked—the large blasts.

Each of these originated kilometers above the surface, visible only as a flash of light mere milliseconds before the ground itself erupted. The enemy was fighting for orbital control, but they called in airstrikes when they could.

Of all the impacts, blasts and explosions that shook Xin Taiyuan on the night of the eleventh, it was neither the largest blasts nor the smallest blasts that were the most important. That prize did not belong to either the army or the occupying force. Instead, it belonged to something that was not a true explosion, but was felt throughout the city all the same.

Some five hundred matte black pods fell to Shanxi. Each one was ballistic, rather than powered, and their entry into Shanxi's atmosphere had been unmarked, as all attention was on the battle raging throughout Shanxi's orbit.

[05:22 Zulu [05:22 Local], June 10, 2649 (Military Calendar)/

UNSC _Winter Is Coming_/

Transit approach, Charon Relay, Sol System]

Orbital Drop Shock Troopers filled the room from wall to wall, with the exception of the platform at the front. Colonel Lee had decided to address the 7th Battalion directly, and they were gathered in hangar 3, which had been given over to the ODST battalion for the briefing.

The room itself was massive, containing mostly of the various equipment that the regular marines required for a spaceborne assault. The D78H-TC/I Pelican IV dropships that were a part of hanger 3 were variations of the century old workhorse of the UNSC, with light shielding installed for additional protection. Parked in the back were M950A/I Keyes pattern Main Battle Tanks, which had replaced the Scorpion MBT in 2632.

Corporal Jon Nieve took all of this in after a single glance, before turning back to the Colonel. The 7th Battalion had been rotated to Earth for light duties after a three year deployment to the edge of Brute Space, and like most of the troopers, he wanted to know what was important enough to pull them from the rear.

"Alright, boys and girls," Lee began, "I'm sure you all want to know why your precious leave time had to be canceled. And before you ask, no, I'm not happy about it either.

"At 13:59 Zulu on Saturday June 6th, UNSC ships opened fire on a formation of unknown ships in the Shanxi System. The ships' hulls were of an unknown design, and they refused to stop when ordered to do so by Task Force 121. By 14:30, all of TF 212 had been destroyed, with the exception of the frigates _Gettysburg _and _Verdun_, which were under orders to hold position at the edge of the system elliptic and report to UNSC HIGHCOM in the event of a loss. However, it would appear that TF 212 did not go quietly, and the enemy took at least equal casualties during the fight.

"As of 13:59 Zulu, June 6th 2649, the UNSC is officially in a state of war. We are spearheading the war effort, with Operation RECLAIMER. RECLAIMER is a twofold operation to retake the Shanxi system. The first part is the Navy's business, not ours, but the short version is that they're going in with two Second Fleet battle groups under Admiral Drescher and pounding anything in their way. _Winter Is Coming_ has a different task, and that's our part of the bargain. She'll come on station in low orbit of Shanxi and drop us into Xin Taiyuan, the capital. It'll be a mid battle drop, and risky as all hell, but if there's a ship in the fleet that can pull it off, it's _Winter Is Coming_. The bad news, however, is that she's going to be clearing orbit right after we drop, so we won't have air support.

We've been tasked by General Holland with securing the city's power plant, AI core, and Army compound, as well as three LZs, Albany, Falcon, and Bravo, so the marines can move in and relieve the army. Nobody else can land if there's a major AA presence in the city, so blow any guns you come across.

"A ONI prowler launched probes from the edge of the system two days ago and was able to get readings on the occupations—there are at least five thousand hostiles in Xin Taiyuan alone, so we have to go in hard and fast before our fellow jarheads can put boots on the ground. If we fuck this up, we're looking at a disaster on a scale that hasn't been seen since the last years of the war.

"Company commanders to me. Everyone else, dismissed." With that, Lee stepped down, and the ODSTs dispersed.

[07:01 Zulu [00:01 Local] ], June 11, 2649 [Military Calendar]/

Xin Taiyuan/

Shanxi [Colony 138-A], Shanxi System]

Nieve grunted as his HEV pod smashed into the side of a building, coming to rest in what had once been a family's dining room.

Now, however, there were three aliens picking themselves up off the floor, their body language clearly conveying their annoyance at having their break interrupted. Nieve watched on his external cameras as each of the aliens pulled a device off of their backs, bringing it around to point in front of them. The devices lengthened, until it was clear that they were rifles.

After a timeless moment, the three aliens closed with the pod, keeping it covered with their rifles. Nieve undid the acceleration harness that kept him immobilized and placed his right hand on the grip of his Model 2620 battle rifle. He was unable to bring the weapon to bear inside the pod, owing to its length, but he flicked his thumb, switching off the safety. With the Model 2620 live and ready to fire, his left hand flashed out, activating the main detonator for the door, which ignited the four charges at each corner, turning the rectangular mass of metal into a high velocity projectile.

The door smashed into the center alien of the three, the combined force of its newfound velocity and mass turning the alien into a smear spread across the door and the rubble of the two walls it crashed through before stopping. The door was, in turn, followed by Cpl. Jon Nieve, who led with his rifle.

The Model 2620 Battle Rifle had been designed as a replacement for the aging BR55 Battle Rifle of the Human Covenant war. It fired 9.5x40mm M643 HP-SAP rounds, which had been designed to strip shields and kill quickly during the Human Covenant War. While the personal shields that the aliens were using operated on a different set of basic principles than Covenant energy shielding, the end result was the same. The shields themselves were also far weaker than that encountered during the war, allowing Nieve to kill the first alien with his second burst of fire before dropping to one knee, dodging the second round.

UNSC ODST armor had not changed much in since its introduction, but one major alteration had been made to the standard design. Like all other UNSC armor, it was outfitted with light energy shielding, much like that of the MK5 MJOLNIR armor the SPARTAN-II's had been equipped with. Despite this, conventional wisdom suggested that it was preferable to not be hit by enemy fire.

Consequently, Nieve had gone to one knee after killing the first alien, and took aim at the second while it adjusted to his sudden movement. Once again, he let loose two bursts of three rounds, with the second burst penetrating and striking the alien in the torso.

Nieve got up slowly, taking the time to put another round in each of the alien's heads and grab one of their rifles, quickly finding the switch to collapse it and attaching it to the magnetic anchors on his rucksack.

It had taken less than a minute for Nieve to make his first three kills of the battle, and as the immediate danger faded, details that had not been matters of life or death began to emerge. His squad's radio channel was filled with status reports, which were cut off by an order from Sergeant Turner: "Fourth squad, I'm marking my position on your HUDs. Get over hear as soon as you can."

Okay, that was a little short, and probably not really worth the amount of time it took me to write it. Don't worry; the next chapter will cover the Battle of Shanxi in full, which means it will almost certainly be the longest chapter yet. I just hope it doesn't take me another month to write it.

On that note, I'm sorry it took so long to get this out—The chapter did not want to be written. I'm not even going to say "see you next week" or anything like that though, since it's been pretty well established by this point that that sort of statement from me is a blatant lie.

One of the reasons this chapter was so hard was this is where the main character gets properly introduced, and characterization is one of the parts of writing I have the most trouble with, especially in third person. (A quick look at my other work will show that I do most of my work in 1st person). Anyways, I can write about what's happening to my heart's content, and I can even get downright prosaic about it, but writing how characters react is much harder. And I can't lean on dialogue to help me with that, since I suck at writing dialogue, mostly.

With any luck, working on this will help with the aspects of my writing that I think need work.

Finally, from here on out, every chapter will contain at least one shout out, mostly just because I can. This one is really pretty obvious, and it's also a decent clue as to what I've been reading lately. The trick is, it's a two part shout out. See if you can figure out both parts.

-PT246


	4. Rising Flames

_Chapter 3: Rising Flames_

[07:18 Zulu [00:18 Local], June 11, 2649 [Military Calendar]/

LZ Albany, Xin Taiyuan/

Shanxi [Colony 138-A], Shanxi System]

Seventeen minutes after the helljumpers had hit the dirt, things had gone to hell. In Cpl Jon Nieve's opinion, this was not entirely unexpected—they were, after all, in a war zone.

4th squad was had successfully reformed after the drop, though not with out casualties. Two pods had fallen through the path of an orbital strike made by the aliens, killed by the random nature of a battlefield. The remaining eight, including Nieve, had made good progress though the city, only getting entangled in one minor skirmish over an anti-air gun. Eventually, PFC Garris had ended the fight by sticking the end of the barrel with a plasma grenade. The grenade's blast both warped the barrel and incinerated several aliens, making the rest easy going for 4th squad.

Currently, they were headed for the government buildings in the eastern section of the city which housed the AI core than ran much of the city. It was, like all such buildings, was heavily reinforced and fortified below ground, and it had held out during the initial bombardment of the city, and much of the subsequent occupation. At some point, however, the aliens had somehow managed to breach the building, and the surviving defenders had taken the AI offline to prevent valuable data from falling into hostile hands.

4th Squad, along with the rest of the 7th Battalion's 2nd company had been tasked with reclaiming the building, as having the city AI back online and assisting in any way it could would be invaluable for the reclamation effort.

At the moment, none of this particularly mattered to Nieve. He had an objective, but more importantly than that, he was moving through the ruins of a human city. Everywhere he looked, buildings had been shattered, leaving towering mounds of rubble, some of which still burned. Here and there, bodies—civilian, military, human and alien alike could be found, half buried in the detritus of war. Nieve, like many of his fellow soldiers, began to understand what they had heard from parents and grandparents when they spoke of the utter devastation of the human-covenant war. And in understanding, they began to feel two things—Anger that humanity was once again at war with an unknown race that seemed to be dedicated to killing every last one of them, and something more far deeper and more powerful.

It wasn't an easy feeling to describe, and each of the ODSTs felt it in their own unique way, which was fitting, because it represented the attribute of humanity that made it unique, the complete and utter refusal to give up in the face of opposition. Instead, every one of the helljumpers that landed on Shanxi in the opening hours of Operation RECLAIMER knew that the invaders would be made to pay a blood price for every dead human in the coming days.

Carried by that feeling, 4th squad advanced rapidly through the city, moving around larger concentrations of alien soldiers, and hiding from patrols. Despite the fact that five hundred men and women had dropped into the city, they were doing their best to remain unnoticed, so that any damage they did as they closed on their objectives would be attributed the city's garrison.

Nieve was on point as the moved through the ruins. It was a nerve-wracking job, since any of the tumbled pieces of rubble could conceal a hostile, and his HUD was having difficulty identifying and tracking the aliens, even with the motion sensors that had been added since the war.

The whole squad was using an old city fighting technique of moving in a half crouch, bent over their weapons, rather than standing erect, as they moved down a damaged street, avoiding both debris and holes in the asphalt.

"Turner." Nieve spoke quietly into his helmet mike, after making sure that it was a private channel between himself and the sergeant. "Something's not right here. To many of the side streets are closed of by rubble. I think-" was as far as he got before the air in front of him was torn apart by tracer fire.

"Ambush!" Nieve wasn't sure who shouted it, but it didn't matter anyways, since they had all reacted to the initial gunfire in the exact same way. Everyone had hit the deck behind the nearest piece cover. The half crouch they had been in was all that had kept several of them from being hit in the chest.

Seconds after the squad found cover, more fire streamed in, this time coming from one of the buildings to the right of the squad.

"Shit!" Turner called, recognizing the form of the ambush. "Nieve, Allen, hit that LMG to the front, Gray and Garris, cover them! Everyone else on the shooters!" Following his own advice, the sergeant started looking for muzzle flashes coming from the deserted buildings alongside the street.

Nieve leaned to his left, looking out beyond the pile of rubble he had gone prone behind. And then he promptly rolled back to the right as a stream of fire hit the space where his head had been. "Bastard's got a bead on me! Garris, do you have a shot?"

In response, the ODST crawled forward to the edge of the mound of detritus that he'd been using as cover of his own. From there, he let rip tight three round bursts at the gunner.

Most of the rounds simply threw up small chunks of concrete and puffs of dust, but enough got through that Chris and Allen were able to join in, their combined weight of fire effectively suppressing the machine gun.

Under the weight of his squadmate's covering fire, Nieve sprinted forwards until he was at the base of the tangled wreck of concrete and steel that was the improvised machine gun nest. He quickly grabbed one of his grenades, pulling the pin and cooking it for a second before he lobbed it up and over the rubble.

There was a brief, surprised sounding noise, and then a concussive thump as the small device detonated, sending out shrapnel with enough force to pierce kinetic shields and armor.

Nieve didn't get much of a chance to celebrate though, as another alien slipped around the side of the barricade and began pounding his shields on full automatic. It took less than a seconds for him to respond, bringing his battle rifle to bear, as the squad mates who had covered him from behind began redirected their fire.

Seventh Generation ODST battle armor was tough enough to take several bursts of full auto fire and retain integrity, even without shielding. With shielding, it was capable of taking enough fire to kill several marines in lighter armor. That didn't mean it was invincible. Nieve's shielding held up well enough against the surprise attack against his flank, but he didn't notice the small disk that landed at his feet until it was too late.

For a fraction of a second the world erupted into flames and smoke, and Nieve was thrown backwards into the rubble heap. Despite the ringing in his head, and a flare of pain in his leg, he brought up his rifle, or tried to.

All that was left of the weapon was twisted mass of metal that looked vaguely like it had once been a rifle.

Nieve dropped it, and grabbed the pistol from the magnetic holster on his thigh, ignoring the incessant warning from his armor about breached shields and compromised plating. Sound was muted, and what he saw was a little blurry, but the veteran trooper brought up his pistol, aiming and firing regardless.

From where he was, he could see that the rest of the squad was taking casualties, even with the enemies in front of the eliminated. The ambushers had chosen their position well, and raked the squad with plunging fire, shooting down into them from the side, against which they had very little cover.

Three were already dead by the time Nieve took out the machine gun, and every man in the squad had been wounded. The ODSTs were sending back almost as much fire as they were taking, but their chances of escaping the ambush decreased with every passing moment.

From where he was, the most Nieve could do was give covering fire, and ineffective covering fire at that. He couldn't even see into the windows the aliens were firing from, although he could tell which ones they were. The exception to this was the window that was almost directly above him, and who's occupant had thrown the grenade.

Nieve's M6D pistol had a design that was almost two centuries old, predating even the Human-Covenant war, in which it had seen extensive service. That didn't make the massive rounds, each of which was explosive, fired by the weapon any less effective.

It took three shots to breach the shield on the alien who was attacking Nieve, and a further two to crack through its armor and kill it. The entire time he was shooting at it, it never flinched from the impacts, and managed to put a hole in Nieve's left arm before it died.

Nieve turned the half empty pistol towards the rest of the firefight, even though he knew it was pointless. He planned on fighting until he was dead, regardless of what happened to the rest of his squad.

Instead of more dead and dying, though, he was just in time to see a pair of rockets streak across the street, tearing apart the front of the building the shooters were taking cover in. Seconds later, the rattling sound of more UNSC rifles joined in, bullets tearing apart what was left, including the aliens inside.

"Medic!"

* * *

><p>AN: I'm alive! It's a shock, I know.

I'd originally planned (well, I don't really plan that much, but anyways…) to make this a little longer, but I felt like it had reached a good ending point for the chapter, so I guess the rest of the battle for Shanxi will take up the next chapter, too. The good news, though, is that I've actually got a fair bit of the next two or so chapters already written. I can't plan on them coming out anytime soon, since exams start next week, but we'll see.

Also, something I've been meaning to put in my author's notes for a while: Chapter two does have a number of errors which have been pointed out to me by a number of different reviewers. (At least a third of all of the reviews I've gotten, I think) Anyways, the point of this is that it will be rewritten, at some point. It's not going to change that much, I just have to find the time to clean up some of the worst bits.

-PT246


	5. Picking up the Pieces

_Chapter 5: Picking Up The Pieces_

[08:03 Zulu [01:03 Local], June 11, 2649 [Military Calendar]/

Xin Taiyuan/

Shanxi [Colony 138-A], Shanxi System]

"Easy, helljumper."

Nieve groaned in reply to the medic. Now that the fight was over and the adrenalin had worn off, he was flat on his back, while his shrapnel ridden leg complained about his standing on it, and his left arm just plain hurt like a bitch, despite the painkillers the suit automatically administered.

The army medic kneeling next to him had taken a while to reach him, leaving others in the army squad that had taken care of their ambushers to do basic first aid while he attended to the worst wounded. Nieve knew that he must have gotten off lightly, given just how long it had taken the medic deal with the others before him.

"Shrapnel in the left leg, moderate bleeding." The soldier next to him reported. "Looks like it missed the femoral artery. There's also the gunshot wound in the left bicep. You got lucky, helljumper, it missed that artery too."

The medic nodded, then pulled out a can of biofoam. "There's not much else I can do here in the field," he said, before filling the arm wound with it, and moving on to the shrapnel wounds. "You need to get the fragments picked out of your leg, and your arm's a mess. I've been seeing it all over for the last week. The weapons the turians— "

"Turians?" Nieve asked, fighting through the painkillers.

"That's what the aliens call themselves, as far as we can tell. Most of our guys just call them birds, though. Anyways, the weapons the turians use may fire small rounds but they cause far more damage than you'd think. Your arm is a royal mess right now, and I can't do anything for it right now.

"How's he doing, doc?" It was Turner, who was moving under his own power, having escaped with nothing more than a number of grazes and a pair of cracked ribs from where his chestplate had taken the force of a couple of shots.

"Well, Sergeant, he's alive. Not going to do you much good in a fight, but your squad is pretty much out of action anyways, with the number of wounded and dead you've got." The medic paused for a moment before continuing, "Now that the UNSC is here, are medevacs available?"

"Sorry, doc, but there's too much hostile AA for the pelicans to hit dirt. That's one of the reasons they sent us in first." Turner was matter of fact, even though it was his men who needed the evac.

"Damn. Well, we set up an outpost not to far from here. It'll be better for your men if we can get them somewhere safe." With that, the medic stood up and walked over to his squad leader.

Turner looked down at Nieve. "You look like shit, Jon."

"Fuck you, Sarge. I'd feel like shit too, if it weren't for the painkillers. Now, are we moving, or what?" Being shot did not put Nieve in a good mood. "Because I'm going to need a hand if we're going anywhere."

"Easy, corporal. The army's got it taken care of. They were nice enough to bring stretchers, and some of us can still walk."

"How many of us can't, Turner?" Nieve turned deadly serious, ignoring the euphoric effects of the painkillers.

Turner's reply was solemn. "Allen, Smith, and Cooper are all dead. If that bastard with the machine gun had waited a few seconds more, instead of being trigger happy, every one of us would have bought it. You and Garris can't walk, but otherwise, we should be able to make it to the army safehouse."

"Fuck." For a moment, that was all Nieve could say. Between the drops and the ambush, half of the squad—five of his friends—was dead. "There's no way we're going to be able to make it to the AI core, Sarge."

"I know." Turner stepped aside, letting a pair of soldiers carrying a stretcher reach Nieve. "I've radioed it in to command already."

* * *

><p>After an eternity of looking at columns of smoke filling the sky, doing his best to ignore the pain that the constant movement of the stretcher caused, even with painkillers, Nieve was set down in the basement of a building.<p>

When he looked around, there were two things that caught his eye: The line of stretchers to which his own had been added, some of which had blankets pulled up over the faces of their occupants, and the number of men who grabbing weapons that had been left nearby.

"Trooper." Nieve looked back up to see a man in scrubs standing over him. "Hold still for a second. I need to get you out of your armor."

ODST armor was simpler to take off than the MLONJIR type armor that the Spartan units were using, but it was still something of a process. When the man inside the armor was wounded in several places, it became an extremely difficult process, and more than a little painful.

Halfway through, Nieve blacked out.

* * *

><p>Nieve shot straight upright as he woke up. He was still in the same badly lit basement as he had been when he lost consciousness, but something was off.<p>

"Where is everybody?"

"They left, Jon." Turner's voice came from beside and above him. "Once I told them what the plan was, the army boys left behind a token force to guard the wounded and the supplies, then headed off to cause some mayhem and help with the assault on the AI core."

"How bad is it, Sarge?" Nieve couldn't bring himself to look at either his arm or his leg.

"It's pretty bad." The new voice was one Nieve had heard just before everything went black. "You're luck the patrol heard the fighting and investigated. Not only did they kill the rest of the birds, without the first aid they gave you and the work the medic did, you'd have lost that arm. You still might.

"Those small rounds the birds' rifles fire, well, they don't cause all that much damage on their own, but the momentum transfer from the bullet causes severe hydrostatic shock all around the point of entry. Most of the soft tissue in your upper arm has been reduced to pulp, and trust me, you're luck you can't feel it.

"You're not going to be getting back into the action anytime soon, and if you don't get to better facilities soon, we might have to do something more drastic about the wound." With that, the doctor got up and left, moving down the line of patients.

"Here." Turner pressed something into Nieve's working hand. "This fell out of your helmet when we took it off. Is she your girlfriend?"

Nieve looked down at the picture in his hand. It was a young woman dressed in fatigues, holding an MA5E assault rifle. "My sister. She joined up not long after I did, but went army. Said she'd rather protect home from another Brute attack than ship out across the UNSC."

"'Another' Brute attack? How close were you to Brute space?"

"Geart's pretty much right on the edge. We got raided once every couple of years, and we were too small to rate much in the way of defense besides a small garrison."

"Hmm." Turner sat back on his haunches, thinking for a second. "I think I've been there. We dropped in about ten years back after the places was completely overrun."

Nieve looked into Tuner's eyes before replying. "I know. Why do you think I decided to be an ODST?"

The silence stretched on for a long time, before Turner spoke again. "Jon, you know that when this shitstorm settles, you'll probably be assigned to another squad?"

"Yeah, I know. I'll miss you guys."

* * *

><p>What, were you expecting them to keep on fighting after being mauled in that ambush? Even 500 years in the future, medical tech isn't that advanced, and they don't have medi-gel yet, since biofoam still works pretty well.<p>

In short, it's possible to keep fighting with certain kinds of wounds, but there are others that will put someone down for weeks or months at a time. And a squad that's half dead and all wounded isn't in any shape to do fighting.

So we get character development (Well, I hope I managed to pull some character development off) instead.

Also, if it isn't clear, Nieve won't be going back to his squad because by the time he's finished healing, they'll be off somewhere else.

-PT246


	6. Interlude I: Explanations

_Interlude I: Explanations_

[Citadel Council Meeting Audio Records]

_Councilor Nostros_: Councilor, are you telling us that the turians decided to launch a war without bothering to inform this Council?

_Councilor Pallin_: It was not meant to be a full scale war. It was a punitive expedition, based on the reckless and unlawful exploration of unopened mass relays by these 'humans'.

_Councilor Kirosa_: Illogical, councilor. You cannot justify a punitive expedition when the targets of that expedition have no knowledge of what they are violating, and have not had any contact with your species at all. There must have been a way to initiate first contact other than violence.

_Pallin_: It is irrelevant, now. Humanity reacted in a way that we did not expect.

_Nostros_: Explain.

_Pallin_: The planet we attacked was clearly a colony. Based on their limited use of mass effect technology, we assumed that the humans either few or no other colonies, besides their home planet, and a correspondingly small military, given the small size of the fleet that was defending Shanxi.

It quickly became clear that while they were based on a different set of design principles, human ships were more than capable of facing down ships based on mass effect technology. Also, once the orbital battle was over, they contested the initial troop landings, before retreating into the city to carry out a guerilla campaign.

At this point, we thought the battle was more or less over, requiring only the destruction of the human soldiers' hidden bases to end the campaign. They proved us wrong. Within a week of the first battle, a second fleet arrived, five times the size of the one we initially faced, and carrying a large number of troops as well.

We lost that battle almost as quickly as we won the first one, and only a single ship managed to escape to the relay. Exactly what happened to the ground element of our expedition is unknown.

_Nostros_: So you lost fifteen ships, and an entire heavy brigade is either missing, dead, or captured. That does not sound like a successful expedition to me.

_Pallin_: We had planned on informing the Council after the action had taken place. We did not expect the humans to put up such a strong fight.

_Kirosa_: The actions of the Hierarchy could potentially launch a major interstellar war. Is there any chance that reparations can be made, or of some form of diplomatic intervention can be made by the Council?

_Pallin_: It is unlikely. The humans will almost certainly destroy any ship that attempts to make contact with them. Historical documents acquired during the occupation of Shanxi suggest that they are an extremely xenophobic species.

_Kirosa_: What sort of documents have you acquired to suggest this?

_Pallin_: They are records of a devastating war waged by a coalition of other species against humanity less than a century ago. It seems unlikely that they will react to further contact with anything other than force.

[Pause]

_Nostros_: Very well. Councilor, the Council as a whole must remain neutral in this matter, as we believe the conflict was started with undue cause. However, the Turian Hierarchy may respond to hostile actions as it sees fit without Council intervention.

I declare this meeting of the Council adjourned.

[Record Ends]

* * *

><p>FROM: Colonel F. Lee,<p>

TO: Sergeant J. Nieve,

SUBJECT: Reassignment

Sgt. Nieve,

You are hereby directed to take command of the 2nd Special Action Squad, A Company, 7th Battalion. Effective as of 13:00, August 5th, 2649.

Respectfully,

COL Frank Lee,

CO 7th Shock Troops Battalion,

105th Shock Troops Division

* * *

><p>AN:

I was trying to decide whether or not to incorporate a Turian viewpoint into this fic, and I ended up settling for these interludes instead of a full fledged Turian character. They won't always be of the council, but this was a good place to start. They'll also contain a bit of UNSC information, since they'll be followed by a time skip.

As for what just happened, the council told off the turians for starting the war, but didn't actually do anything about it. Politics at it's finest. As far as Nieve is concerned, having a sergeant be officially in charge of a squad is a little odd, especially since the battalion CO is assigning the job to him personally, but then again, 2nd SAS (No relation to the British organization) or any SAS, isn't exactly a normal unit. You'll see soon enough.

One last thing: The current update pace isn't going to continue. My muse grabbed me by the throat and said, "Screw finals, you suck at calculus anyways. Get writing." So a chapter got written. It's actually the chapter that comes after this. Once that got written, I had to fill in the gaps, or it was useless, so we got two more chapters and an interlude. And half a chapter following the one that got written first.

After I finish posting all of this, I have no idea when the next chapter will come. It may be a while, but I think I've made it clear before now that I'm bad at updating regularly.

-PT246


	7. Descent into Ruins

_Chapter 5: Descent into Ruins_

[17:56 Zulu [12:29 Local], Nov 29, 2649 [Military Calendar]/

_UNSC Silent One_/

[REDACTED—SOCOM/ONI LEVEL 1]]

"_Normally, this would have fallen to the Spartans, but this was the closest unit with the necessary clearance."_

Newly promoted Sergeant Jon Nieve snapped his drop harness together as the heavy metal door slammed closed.

"_The mission is time critical. If you succeed, the entire course of the war could change."_

A row of lights changed from red to green on his HUD, indicating that his squad was ready.

"_There will be hostiles. Intel doesn't know if they have compromised the objectives or not."_

There was a vague rumble and Nieve could feel the deceleration as the frigate moved into position.

"_There may be civilians on site. Command wants no survivors."_

The pod began to shake and then there was an almighty roar is it launched.

"_You will bring him back alive, or you will all die trying. There is no middle ground. Good luck, Helljumpers."_

Four streaks of flame crossed the sky, as the ODST's HEV pods streaked towards the ruined surface of the planet below. The ablative cover of the pods burned off, revealing a second layer that, like the first, was designed to be radar absorbent, making the pods harder to track.

On this particular planet, being almost invisible to remote detection wouldn't have really mattered as debris was constantly falling from orbit, remnants of battles long past. And while four objects falling so close together was unusual, it was by no means of unheard of.

To Nieve, this had meant, during mission planning, that they would still be dropping in fifteen clicks out, since the target didn't have the manpower to investigate that far away, and moving in on foot.

The pods smashed down into the abandoned city, in one case passing through a building—The pods may have been ballistic, but they had been launched from orbit and had plenty of time build up velocity—before they crashed into the ground, all within a hundred meters of each other.

[21:05 Zulu [15:38 Local], Nov 29, 2649 [Military Calendar]/

[REDACTED—SOCOM/ONI LEVEL 1]/

[REDACTED—SOCOM/ONI LEVEL 1]

"Everyone, check in, over." Nieve spoke into his helmet mike as he drew a bead on a turian guard with his rifle.

"Echo two, in position, over." That was Norris, the squad sniper.

"Roger. Echo three here. Tangos all over the damn place. Getting in is going to be messy." Jones, the demolitions expert, offered his opinion on the mission.

"This is four. We can't make a direct assault on this place. Way to many hostiles." Hayes may have just been a rifleman, but he could read the situation as well as any other ODST.

"OK. Norris, do you have eyes on the target?" The sniper was a few stories up in a ruin overlooking the camp. If anyone could see their objective, he could.

"Negative, sergeant. There's a big tent in the center of the camp, which might hold it, but there are a couple of prefab structures near to it, so I can't be certain." There was a brief pause. "There's also at least one sniper standing guard."

"Alright. Norris, the first thing we do is take out that sniper. Quietly. Mark his position, and I'll take care of him when it's time." An indicator showed up Nieve's HUD, giving the direction and distance to the sniper. "Everyone, pull back and rally on Norris. We're going to wait for dark and come up with a better plan."

Nieve slipped back from the perimeter of the camp, crawling backwards on his stomach until he was out of sight. He then set off at a run, moving towards where the rest of the squad was gathering.

Norris had set up halfway up a ruined building, and his rifle rested in the hole where the window had been, centuries or millennia before. Almost the entire camp was within his field of vision.

It had been tempting for him use an even higher room, which would had offered even greater vision, but it also would have been more obvious to anyone watching. It was a well known fact that snipers preferred the high ground, and the first place anyone looked if there was a firefight was the top stories of nearby buildings. Given that the team wanted to remain undetected, Norris had felt that sacrificing some of his ability to see the camp for a better hiding spot was the lesser of two evils.

The view was still good enough for the rest of the team to have gathered there for planning. Nieve and Jones were talking quietly in a corner while they waited for Hayes to finish setting up a radio uplink with the _Silent One_, a UNSC frigate that was used almost exclusively by ONI, when they required something more powerful than the average prowler. _Silent One_ was currently in the outer edges of the system, having delivered its cargo of ODSTs.

It didn't take Hayes long to adjust the settings on the backpack mounted unit he carried for long range transmissions, and Nieve sent a brief, heavily encrypted signal out into the blackness at the edge of the solar system.

"This is Echo One. Target is unreachable at this time. We're waiting for nightfall. Over."

Some twenty minutes later an equally brief reply filtered back to the squad, "Roger, Echo One. We'll stand by for exfil. _Silent One_, out." By the time the radio waves carrying the message passed through the intervening space to reach Echo Squad, the situation had already changed drastically.

It not long after the first transmission was sent, when Norris interrupted Nieve's planning with a report of increased activity within the camp.

"What kind of activity, Norris?" Nieve moved from the back of the room to the window, activating the zoom function on his visor. It was nowhere near as powerful as the scope on the sniper's rifle, but it magnified the image enough for him to see that something was going on.

"There are a lot of people gathering around the tent in the center. There's a chance they may be running some sort of test on the target, if it's in there."

"Well, shit." Nieve turned to the rest of the squad. "Get your gear, we're moving. Norris, you're on overwatch. Everyone else, we're hitting them along the northern approach. Stay low in the ruins, and don't shoot 'till I say so."

The squad reacted quickly; grabbing the rifles they had placed up against the wall before filing out of the room with Nieve at their head. The took the stairs at a run, emerging onto the ground floor with weapons raised, then continuing into the ruins.

As they reached the edge of the camp, Nieve gave them a hand signal to stop, before he activated his radio. "Norris, report."

"Looks like a bunch of the off duty guards are heading to the tent. You're going to have to come up with a way to kill a lot of them, and fast." The sniper's voice was as calm and collected as he made his report.

"Right. Do they still have a sniper of their own?"

"Yeah. You want me to kill him?"

"Not yet." Nieve responded. "We need to take out the perimeter guards before we go hot. I'll let you know when. And once you're finished with him, make sure no one reaches the shuttle." With that, he made another signal to his squad, who began working low crawling their way forwards to avoid detection.

The sentry posted at the northeastern edge of the camp never even saw them coming. The ODST's armor had been painted in a dark urban camouflage scheme which was less effective during daylight, but that didn't stop the helljumpers, each of whom had successfully completed stealth training. Jones was the one who planted the knife in the base of the turian's neck, though he had to work for a fraction of a second before the guard dropped dead.

"Norris, take out that sniper." Even as he gave the command for the attack to start, Nieve was grabbing a grenade from one of his many equipment pouches. He pulled the pin, and tossed it as far towards the center of the camp as he could before joining the rest of his squad in running for the nearest cover.

To their credit, the turian guards were well trained, and those who survived the grenade blast grabbed their weapons—even the off duty troopers had sidearms—and began searching for the cause of the blast.

They didn't have far to look. The ODSTs were steadily advancing towards the center of the camp, moving from cover to cover while shooting as quickly and accurately as they could.

Nieve watched a turian bring up his pistol, the weapon still expanding as he put a pair of rounds through the alien's helmetless skull, taking advantage of the fact that his shield wasn't activated.

The guards who had been on shift proved to be much more problematic for the humans, as they were wearing armor with active shields, and every one of them was helmeted. They began to shoot back, the assault rifles they carried far more effective than pistols of the scientists and off duty soldiers.

"Grenade!" It was Hayes who noticed the small device being thrown at them, but they all scattered to get clear of the blast. They had no choice but to run into the open, which the turians took full advantage of. All of their shields sparked as rounds deflected off of them, and Nieve knew that no one in the squad could take direct fire for much longer.

There was a sudden hissing sound, and Nieve dove to the ground as a glowing blue orb passed overhead. It made contact with the chest of one of the scientists, who stared at it in fascinated horror before the plasma grenade detonated in globe of blue-white fire, taking out almost all of the scientists who had been hiding behind the soldiers.

The remaining turians were shaken by the blast and the ODSTs used that ruthlessly in their favor, killing them while they were still stunned. Nieve and the other two with him took care of anyone in the open, while Norris shot anyone who was taking cover from his elevated position in the building.

"Report!" Nieve ejected the empty magazine from his rifle—his second, for the day—and slammed a new one into place as he stood and surveyed the results of the brief firefight. In less than four minutes, the ODSTs had taken out the remaining four on duty guards, as well as ten more turians who were wearing fatigues and carrying small arms. "Is anyone injured?"

As a series of negative replies from his squad came in, Nieve moved towards the center tent. Between the frag grenade he had thrown in the opening stages of the fight and the plasma grenade which had effectively ended it, it was hard to tell how many of the civilian archeologists they had killed.

He stepped through the charred corpses as the rest of his men fell in behind him, heading towards the coffin shaped object that had been their objective for the whole time.

"Sergeant, this one's still alive." Nieve turned towards Jones, who was standing next to a turian, his rifle casually pointed at its head. "Is it in any shape to talk?"

"No, Sarge. Looks like the plasma blast did a real number on him." They both knew what was coming next, but Jones had chosen to check anyways.

"You know our orders, Jones. No survivors." Nieve hated giving the order, but they couldn't afford to leave anyone behind who knew anything.

There was the soft thump of a suppressed weapon followed by the sound of a brass shell dropping to the ground, and then it was over.

"Hayes, get on the horn with the _Silent One_. Tell them that the situation changed, but we've secured the objective." He walked towards the object in the center of the tent, and looked at the small diagnostic screen on the side. "And tell them to send down a medic. It looks like the birds started thawing him out."

"Wilco, Sarge. How long do we have before the he's awake?" For the first time all day, Hayes sounded almost excited.

Nieve looked down into the gold faceplate of the giant in battered green armor, all of covered in a slight dusting of frost. "The birds started a slow thaw, rather than a combat thaw. Tell the _Silent One_ that Sierra-117 should be awake in about an hour."

A/N You should have seen this coming. One more chapter dealing with the Chief, and then we get down to the bloody business of invading turian colonies.

-PT246


	8. Lost and Found

_Chapter 6: Lost and Found_

[22:39 Zulu [17:12 Local], Nov 29, 2649 [Military Calendar]/

[REDACTED—SOCOM/ONI LEVEL 1]/

[REDACTED—SOCOM/ONI LEVEL 1]

Pelicans were not quite machines. In atmosphere, the engines were deafening on the outside, and loud enough to make hearing protection advisable on the inside. In space, the noise was reduced, since the sound of the engines didn't pass through vacuum. The vibrations, however, created a noticeable noise of their own.

The dropship seemed quieter than normal to Nieve. The ambient noise was still there, but no one is his squad was talking, or moving around, so there wasn't even the quiet clanking of armor on hard seats.

The noise was engulfed into a black hole of soundlessness that emanated from the single figure sitting motionless in the far end of the troop compartment. The hulking green armored form had said less than twenty words since being woken up from cryogenic sleep on the surface of an alien planet, surrounded by the corpses of an unknown species. Spartan 117, the legendary Master Chief of the Human-Covenant War and last surviving member of the SPARTAN-II program, was apparently content to keep it that way.

None of Nieve's men were interested in conversation either. Usually, when the mission was over, Hayes and Jones at the very least could be expected to exchange banter over the radio, though Norris tended to keep to himself more often then not. This time, if they were saying anything, it was over private channels between themselves.

As far as his men were concerned, Nieve thought it was probably awe and a little bit of fear that kept them quiet. ODSTs and Spartans had never really gotten along, but there was a grudging respect between the two special forces units, and nothing but admiration where Spartan 117 was concerned.

His thoughts were interrupted when a bright red light by the rear ramp of the dropship changed to yellow, followed by a soft impact as it touched down.

Nieve undid the harness that strapped him into his seat, and stood as the magnetic locks on his boots attached him to the deck, before he opened a channel to the rest of his squad and the Spartan. "We're here. Nieve and Jones, you're looking for the computer databanks. When you find them, blow them. We don't want any of the information there getting into the birds' hands. Hayes, you're with me." Even though he was speaking into a radio, he turned to face the now standing Spartan. "Master Chief, you know what's important on this wreck. We'll be following you."

The yellow light turned green, and the ramp lowered. It was as silent as anything else in space, as all of the air had been evacuated from the back of the pelican to avoid depressurization when they reached their objective.

The Master Chief was the first off of the pelican. His rifle was out, but the held it in a relaxed grip, clearly expecting there to be nothing worth shooting on the wreck of the _Fortward Unto Dawn_, and Nieve and his marines followed him down. Like every member of the corps, they had all received basic zero-g training, and as part of becoming ODSTs, they had been fully certified in z-g combat. Consequently, they moved through the wreck of the ship easily as the two teams split and headed off in different directions.

As Nieve followed the bulky figure of the Master Chief through darkened corridors, he noticed little details about the ship. There was no power, but many of the doors in their path had been forced open, and the marks left behind looked similar to what he'd seen on Shanxi. Turian weapons, he concluded, used for breaching. Otherwise, the ship was in almost pristine condition. The one hangar they had passed had been completely empty, and the vehicle bay only contained what looked like a few salvaged wrecks and mission kills, all of which were evidence of the battles the ship and it's complement of marines had seen.

Eventually, they reached what seemed to be their destination. It was a cryo bay, and all of the tubes lining the walls were empty—The entire crew had been evacuated onto the supercarrier _Shadow of Intent_ when it became clear that the _Dawn_ would have to stay behind to provide transport for the team that fired Installation 04 in the center of the Ark. The only exception was a gap on one wall, where one of the tubes had been removed. An old MA5C assault rifle was wedged into the pod next to the gap. The paint was chipped in places, there were several long scratches running across the barrel, and the stock of the rifle had been worn down to bare metal, which could only be done, Nieve knew, by getting up close and bashing something with the rifle, or several somethings, repeatedly.

It was the Chief's weapon. If the fact that it was the only heavily used weapon they'd seen, not to mention the only weapon they'd seen that wasn't attached to a damaged vehicle, wasn't enough to make it clear, the way the Chief attached the rifle he'd taken from the pelican to his back and picked it up the MA5C instead left the ODST's with no doubt.

Nieve watched as he ejected the magazine and checked that there were still rounds in it, before slamming it home and pulling back the charging handle. Spartans and ODSTs were trained to use whatever weapon was at hand, so there was no sentimentality attached to the weapon, so Nieve thought he was probably just using it because it was familiar.

The Master Chief then walked over to a small pedestal. It was a type of AI interface common throughout ships, where the AI could project its avatar and interact visually with members of the crew. The Chief reached out and pressed a button on the side of the pedestal and a chip slid out of the consol, which he then slid into the back of his helmet.

"Sarge, that was an old AI storage unit, wasn't it?" The way Hayes spoke made it more of a statement than a question.

"Yeah." Nieve replied, over the private channel that the lance corporal had opened up. "I don't know why he's bothering, though. Any AI that old has got to be rampant."

"But if he's getting an AI, then it has to be—"

"UNSC Serial Number CTN 0452-9, Cortana." Both ODSTs started at the voice that broke into their conversation. "And I'll have you know that I'm not rampant, Sergeant."

"That remains to be seen, Ma'am." Nieve kept his voice calm, despite his surprise at having the channel hacked. "If you don't mind me asking, how did you hack this conversation? UNSC communication protocols and encryptions have advanced in the past century."

"I've been working on it since your first transmission to the ship at the edge of the system, Sergeant. There's just enough power left in this wreck for me to keep minimal sensors online, so heard that and all of your later chatter. That was enough for me to crack the encryptions, which, I might add, are still based on algorithms I helped design."

Nieve could have sworn that the AI sounded smug, like she'd just scored a point against him but he let it slide, turning to the Master Chief instead. "Now that you've got Cortana, is there anything else you need, Chief?"

The Spartan didn't even bother with a verbal reply. Instead, an acknowledgement light blinked red on Nieve's HUD, indicating that he had everything he wanted from the wreck.

"Right." The sergeant opened a channel to the other half of his team. "Norris, we're done up here. How's it going with the data banks?"

"It's done, Sarge. We checked, and most of it had been wiped already, but I had Jones rig it all to blow anyways. The two of us are waiting back at the bird. The moment you're back, Jones'll blow it all sky high."

"Roger that. We're moving." Nieve opened a different channel, this time to Hayes and the Chief. "We're done here. Lets get back to the pelican. I have a feeling that the captain of the _Silent One_ wants to debrief you as soon as possible, Chief, and then bring you up to date on the last hundred years or so of history."

* * *

><p>AN OK, it's kinda short. Don't worry, the next chapter will be longer, and you'll get to see more of the war as well. A large part of it is already written, so it shouldn't be too long before it comes out, although with the way I procrastinate… I'll try to have it up before the end of January, but no guarantees.


	9. Escalation and Encounters

_Chapter 7: Escalation and Encounters_

[17:56 Zulu [12:29 Local], Nov 29, 2649 [Military Calendar]/

Station Keeping Orbit, Trayus Relay/

Trayus System]

The Turian fleet guarding Trayas was, of necessity, large. Nearly a hundred ships, many of them cruisers, were split between watching over the Trayas relay and the planet itself.

The relay was the real reason for the massive concentration of ships. It was the only known link with the sector of space that humanity inhabited. There had been no human response to the Turian attack, but since the single surviving ship of that doomed effort had fled, badly damaged, through the relay, an entire fleet had been placed on alert and moved to the system.

The backbone of the fleet was an enormous dreadnought, capable of killing anything that passed within range of its main gun. It was accompanied by some thirty cruisers and heavy cruisers, and the rest of the fleet consisted of wolf packs of frigates fast enough to hunt down anyone who tried to pass through the relay from either direction.

They soldiers and spacers of the Turian Hierarchy had every reason to be confident in their ability to defend the relay. There was no way that an attacking force could come through the relay in sufficient numbers to break through the defensive forces, since the Turian fleet was both the largest and the finest in citadel space. Every man or woman within the feet was exceptionally well trained capable of doing their jobs, even in the midst of battle. Each ship, with the single exception of the dreadnought, had seen action at some point in the last two years against the ubiquitous pirates, raiders, and mercenaries that populated the edge of the galaxy, and each ship had survived, to become battle hardened veterans.

Every single one of them was also facing the wrong way.

Barely a single light minute astern of the largest concentration of Turian ships, a small beacon that had traveled through the relay months ago, hiding in the transit of the single Turian survivor of the attack on Shanxi, activated in response to a query from outside the system. In reply it transmitted it's current location, as well as all the data it's sensors had collected, to the source of the query, before deactivating again, its job done.

Within a minute of the transmission, the first blue-white sphere erupted into space from nowhere, exactly where the beacon had been moments before. It was followed by another, and another, as the metal behemoths of the UNSC Second Fleet emerged from slipspace with all the subtlety of a raging giant.

As each ship completely entered realspace, they launched their complements of YSS-1001 Sabre fighters, creating an expanding screen that spread out hundreds of kilometers in front of the main force.

The Turians were already turning to engage by the time the last ship had appeared, but as fast as their reaction times were, it wasn't fast enough. The massive rounds fired by the MAC cannons of the UNSC ships smashed broadside into the Turians, who were still moving away from their stations around the relay. Direct hits penetrated shields and shattered hulls, bisecting the helpless Turians. Glancing blows were more than capable of breaking kinetic barriers, leaving the survivors of the first salvo defenseless against the second.

The Turians, like all other races that based their shipbuilding on mass effect technology, were forced to deal with massive heat buildups from their own guns. The inability to easily vent the heat into space meant that their ships had been designed for short engagements, before breaking off into FTL. They were used to fighting brief battles, with few casualties on either side.

The UNSC Navy had built its ships around taking tremendous amounts of damage, preferably while dealing a proportional amount of their own. They were big, mean, and ugly, in contrast to the sleeker forms of the mass effect based ships. And they just kept firing, long after a fleet engagement in council space would have normally ended.

Sabre squadrons attacked with missiles of their own, firing into damaged ships with SHIVA warheads, leaving nuclear fireballs behind them. The code that the navy had once adhered to, a remnant of their days at sea long ago, which required that you spare a crippled enemy and pick up survivors had been abandoned in the harsh days of the Human-Covenant war, when neither side asked for, or received mercy.

The UNSC was not the Covenant, though. The Sabres picked through the wrekage, destroying any surviving ship, but at the same time the onboard 'dumb' AIs flagged the location and velocity of escape pods for retrieval after the battle. In the meantime, the fighters continued their grim work, while the gargantuan warships dispersed across the system, relentlessly hunting down and destroying Turian vessels.

The main fight was over in less than thirty minutes. The last ship in the main battlegroup to succumb was the dreadnought, which had continued fighting even as she leaked oxygen from a dozen wounds, and she took three UNSC Frigates and a Cruiser with her as she died.

The Second fleet split apart to handle the various tasks necessary to control the star system. One small group of ships made the transition through the Trayas relay to human space to report success to the UNSC's High Command. Another, much larger contingent took up positions similar to those the Turians had held not too long ago, prepared to defend the relay against all comers. The third, and largest group, moved towards Trayas itself, drop ships and assault transports already swarming from their launch bays as the ground invasion began.

* * *

><p>[07:48 Zulu [02:21 Local], Dec 7, 2649 [Military Calendar]

1/3 Marines Forward Command Post, Lexni/

Trayus, Trayus System]

The command center was filled with techs listening to radios and watching live feeds from the front. The centerpiece of the room, though, was a holographic display showing a twenty five square kilometer section of the city. The centerpiece of the hologram, in turn, was a bright red line which marked the edge of the territory the UNSC had been able to hold. One section was flashing, indicating heavy fighting in the region.

"This is the worst of it." Colonel Martin pointed to the flashing section of the map. "The Turians mounted a large scale offensive here, in sector 42, and they're close to overrunning our lines. It cost nearly an entire battalion to seize that sector—the birds were dug in heavily, and didn't want to give it up—and if we let them reclaim it they'll divide the territory we've taken and hand us a defeat in detail."

The 2nd Special Action Squad had been attached to the 1/3 Marines for the battle, so that they would have the capability to perform unconventional operations in their area of the battlefield. They were all listening intently to what the Colonel had to say since Nieve and the rest of his marines all knew that he wouldn't be giving them the information if it weren't important.

"Alpha company is holding that sector, and several reserve units, including a tank battalion, have been sent forward to help. They're only going to do so much good if we don't find a way to take the pressure off, though.

"Command decided that the best way to do that was to send a Spartan team to take out the Turian CP, which is somewhere in this region." A circle appeared on the map, about a kilometer back from the fighting. "Lieutenant Fraiser," here Martin gestured to another marine who was standing to one side of the holoprojector, "Came up with a little something to add to the mess that the Spartans are going to make."

Fraiser stepped forward and gestured towards the map. "Our own recon elements found something interesting yesterday. It's too far from the CP to be a target of opportunity for the Spartans, but it shouldn't give you any problems.

"It's a Turian supply catche. It's underground, so we weren't able to call artillery or air to blow it up, but taking it out should be a huge setback for the birds. If you can get in there and take it out, they'll have to pull back, since they won't have the food or ammo to keep up the heavy fighting."

"Lieutenant, if the cache is underground, how did your recon elements find it?" Details were important to planning an op, and as far as Nieve was concerned, who found the cache and how they did it was critical to knowing what to do next.

"This city is fairly old, Sergeant. There are a couple of different tunnel networks that run through the whole place. Our scouts were exploring one and marked the position before they continued on. The route they mapped is the one you'll be using to get in." Fraiser typed a command into the holoprojector, and it zoomed in on the sector, superimposing the tunnels on the above ground map.

"There's an entrance not to far from here, actually. It's heavily guarded and mined, since we don't want the birds sneaking in behind our lines, but it's also the easiest way in for you. From there, you have to make your way through the tunnels to the cache. The parts of the underground system that we've mapped so far will be downloaded to your armor, so you know where to go and how to get there.

"Be careful. There have been a couple of minor skirmishes down there already, between our patrols and the birds, and you don't want to attract attention before you've set the charges."

"Do we have a time limit, sir?"

"The Spartans are set to hit the CP sometime in the next twenty four hours, Sergeant, but we don't know when. You know how they are—they don't like to give out any more details then they have to. Your only restriction is that you can't blow the supplies until they've done their job, or you might alert the birds to the presence of infiltrators behind their lines. Get in, place the charges, and then pull back and wait for the all clear to detonate. Depending on how fast the Spartans work, you might be able to blow them as soon as you place them, or you might have to babysit them for a while."

"Sir." Nieve nodded, and then left the command center, his marines behind him.

[08:15 Zulu [02:48 Local], Dec 7, 2649 [Military Calendar]/

Underground Access, Lexni/

Trayus, Trayus System]

There were lights along the top of the tunnel, but all of them were dark. Most of Lexni had lost power the first day of the fighting, when UNSC bombing runs had destroyed as many power plants as they could locate from orbit. Nieve and his men had been forced to use the night vision capabilities of their helmets, which rendered the narrow accessway in a ghostly greenish tint.

The ODSTs were spread out at intervals of five feet and moved slowly downwards along the sloping floor, weapons raised the whole time. The tunnels they were entering were supposedly secured by regular marine patrols, and the aboveground entrance had been guarded, but none of them wanted to risk being surprised by Turians the patrols had missed.

Eventually, the squad reached a junction with a much larger tunnel. Nieve paused for a moment, bringing up the map that he had been given on his HUD, before telling his men to turn.

The new tunnel had some sort of tracks running along it, and Nieve guessed that it had been some form of underground transportation before the war. The squad slipped between support pillars, using them as cover while they moved forward in sets of two.

"Sarge." Norris was paired with the sergeant this time, and the sniper spoke quietly over a private channel. "There's something else down here."

"Turian?" Nieve replied, jumping to the obvious conclusion.

"I don't think so. We're being trailed from just beyond the edge of our night vision and motion sensors. I only know that something's wrong because whoever it is got a little too close when I was looking back." Norris was as calm as ever, but Nieve saw check the battle rifle he was carrying in place of his preferred sniper rifle.

"Everyone, contact rear." Nieve addressed the whole squad. "Jones, Hayes, keep going and get into position to ambush whoever it is. We'll follow. Don't spring the trap until they've passed you." A second after he spoke, a pair of green confirmation lights blinked on his HUD.

It took three minutes for the explosives expert and his partner to find hiding spots that they deemed sufficient. Jones had ducked behind one of the ever-present pillars, the dark camouflage of his armor blending in with the blackness around him. Hayes had gone prone behind a pile of rubble that had been knocked from the ceiling by an explosion somewhere overhead. Only the barrel of his rifle, which pointed back the way the squad had come, was visible.

Norris and Nieve continued as if nothing had happened, pressing forward into the dark void of the tunnel beyond, pausing every now and then as if they were covering non-existent squadmates who were moving ahead of them.

"Shit." Jones swore as often as any other soldier, but this time his tone of voice made Nieve take notice.

"What is it, Jones?" He asked, knowing his subordinate wouldn't have broken radio silence if it weren't important.

"It's whoever's been stalking us. Looks human, and female. A little above average height, as far as I can tell, but the armor and that weapon… Well, they definitely aren't human, sarge."

"Link your helmet to mine, Jones. I want to see this." By the time he finished speaking, a window had opened up in the corner of their vision, showing grainy footage of what looked like a human female moving up slowly towards the watcher. Jones had been right about her gear, though. The armor looked more like a form fitting body suit than anything else with reinforcing plates here and there, and the weapon had a number of similarities to the expanding rifles the Turians used. The only marking on the armor was a design repeated on the chest and the helmet, but the footage was too poor for him to make it out.

"Change of plans. Try to take her alive, but don't get yourselves killed doing it." While he gave new orders to the ambushers, Nieve made a series of hand gestures to Norris, and they split up, one going to each wall of the tunnel, preparing to run back to the trap they'd set.

He waited with his back pressed against the wall, watching the feed from Jones. The woman was almost at the ambush and while she was moving cautiously, her weapon constantly scanning the tunnel ahead of her, she didn't seem to be aware of what she was walking into.

"Go." This time, Hayes spoke, and everyone in the squad exploded into action. Nieve and Norris began sprinting back down the tunnel, while the other two began shooting.

The woman was about ten feet beyond the hiding spots when the first rounds struck. Nieve could see the her shields flashing as they absorbed the impacts, but they seemed to be stronger than those of the Turian infantry, as they survived the initial barrage. Jones and Hayes were shooting low, aiming for her legs in deference to Nieve's command to take her alive, but it didn't seem to have any effect.

The figure spun around, firing her rifle towards the muzzle flashes, but surprised as she had been, her accuracy left much to be desired, especial since it crouched down in an effort to avoid the fire coming her way.

The two shooters had bracketed her, and her shield started to flash erratically as it faltered, but for some reason she lowered her rifle for a fraction of a second, freeing one hand. That hand shoved forward, and blue field seemed to grow out of it, slamming into Hayes and throwing him back from his position.

It was too little and too late, though. The move had cost her precious seconds, and given her a reprieve from one of the original attackers, but less than a second afterword Nieve decide he was close enough to be confident in his ability to hit her somewhere that wouldn't instantly kill her, and he dropped to one knee and started firing, at almost the exact same time as Norris did.

She was distracted by the stream of bullets coming from Jones, and didn't even notice the other two ODSTs. Their shots hit her squarely in the back of the legs, and the heavy rounds of the battle rifles they carried penetrated both her shields and armor, leaving the flesh beneath a twisted wreck. She collapsed into a spreading pool of her own blood.

Jones reached her first, and he placed a heavy, armored foot on her chest, pushing her back down while his rifle pointed at her head. Nieve and Norris were next, and the squad leader immediately pulled a canister of biofoam from one of his many pouches, spraying it into the mangled flesh of her lower limbs in an attempt to stop her from bleeding out.

"Next time, Sarge, I vote we go for the kill shot. It's easier than this 'take them alive' bullshit." Hayes limped out of the darkness, his armor battered by the force that had hit him and his subsequent flight, but very much alive, to Nieve's relief.

* * *

><p>AN Longest chapter yet, by about two hundred words.

It's only this long because I decided I was going to be nice and not cut the chapter off in the middle of an action sequence with a cliffhanger they way I've previously done.

I don't have much else to say, it should be pretty obvious by now what Nieve and his squad have run into, but if you can't figure it out I'll leave you to guess.

-PT246


	10. Charlie Foxtrot

_Chapter 8: Charlie Foxtrot_

[08:31 Zulu [03:04 Local], Dec 7, 2649 [Military Calendar]/

Underground, Lexni/

Trayus, Trayus System]

The squad had successfully taken down the alien who was stalking them, but now Nieve was faced with a problem, and he didn't like any of the answers, so he decided to appeal to a higher authority.

"Greatsword, this is Echo One," Somewhere the 1/3 marines had picked up the callsign greatsword. "Interrogative. We have a prisoner of unknown race down here. Should we abort and bring them back, or continue the mission." Nieve's question was met with silence, so he tried again. "Greatsword, this is Echo One, do you copy?" When his second attempt to contact command received no response, he realized that their comms couldn't penetrate the tunnels, and he was on his own.

He made his decision. "Jones, Hayes, finish restraining her. Comms with command are out, so we're going to bring her with us."

"I would be easier to kill her," Norris said. Personally, Nieve agreed with his opinion and thought that leaving a body behind was easier than dragging a prisoner around on a covert mission.

"I know. But Command wants prisoners, and—Shit!" He cut himself off with a startled exclamation as almost a dozen red dots appeared on his motion tracker. "Out of sight, now!"

Nieve bent down and hoisted the wounded alien over his shoulder in a fireman's carry, before sprinting towards the side of the tunnel. The rest of the squad had already disappeared against the walls, dropping prone and finding what concealment they could in the rubble that had been shake loose by the constant bombardment of the sector by both side's artillery. He followed suit, placing the bound form he was carrying on the ground next to him.

For the next minute, he watched the contact signals on his motion tracker grow closer, accompanied by pinpricks of light down the tunnel. He knew that if the Turians found them, it was a fight they probably wouldn't win, burdened as they were with the prisoner.

They had the same advantage against the approaching squad as they'd had against their pursuer, though. As far as intel had been able to tell from the engagement on Shanxi, the radar built into the armor worn by Turians searched for element zero signatures and then tagged them based on an additional friend or foe signal. Like almost everything designed by the UNSC, ODST armor contained no element zero, and was functionally invisible to the most common forms of detection used by the Turians.

One thing that hadn't been incorporated into the design of their armor was Sangehelli Empire optical camouflage, though some specialist suits had been issued. Nieve and his men had not received any of the modified suites, and were still visible to what their training instructors had referred to as the 'Mark One Eyeball'. Old fashioned visual detection was Nieve's greatest worry as the Turians closed on their position, sweeping the whole tunnel with tactical lights that had been attached to their rifles.

All of the ODSTs had frozen in place, knowing that any movement could betray them as beams of light glanced across them. The camouflage scheme of their armor broke up their forms, particularly in bad lighting, but they were not in an ideal position, and they knew it.

Nieve's breath caught and he held for a moment, thinking he'd been seen, when a light lingered on him for a second, but the soldier who'd been looking at him turned away. The Turian and the rest of his comrades gathered around one who was crounching on the ground, looking at something.

It was the blood, Nieve realized. They may have managed to hide, but the puddle left behind when their captive had been hit would be a telltale sign of a fight. A sign that the Turians were almost certainly looking for, since it was undoubtedly the sounds of weapons fire that had attracted them so quickly.

There was also brass scattered around, and the biofoam container that had been left where Nieve had dropped it in his hurry to get away, and the Turians found them within seconds of finding the blood. Nieve breathed a sigh of relief as they began to search up and down the tunnel without looking at the base of the walls too closely. It was contained by his helmet, but he reprimanded himself for making noise regardless, knowing his instructors would have killed him, back in recon school.

The five minutes that it took for the Turians to start moving down the tunnel again were some of the most tense of Nieve's life. He'd had the same stealth and concealment training as every other member of his squad, but this was the first time it had really been put to the test. Most of his previous missions had consisted of dropping straight into battle, or being dropped outside of an objective and closing in on it. Some of that had required moving quietly and unseen, but he'd never found himself in the position of having to avoid an enemy who was actively searching for him.

Only after the Turians were several minutes away did Nieve, or any of the ODSTs, begin to move again. They slowly got to their feet, weapons ready and watching for any sign of the investigating squad returning. Once they were sure that no one was lurking in wait for them, they slipped off down the tunnel, carrying the prisoner with them.

They all understood that their choice had been made for them. The Turian patrol was now between them and the UNSC controlled sections of the tunnel network, forcing them to progress onwards, and Nieve had made it clear that the prisoner was coming with them.

When Nieve hoisted her over his shoulder again, the alien stirred, but did not move beyond that. Nieve normally took point in the loose formation the squad was now moving in, but since he was burdened by their prisoner, he let Norris take that position instead, and moved in the middle with his pistol out in place of the rifle he didn't have enough free hands to carry.

Instead of the bounding movements they'd used to reach the point where they'd ambushed the alien, the helljumpers began to move down the tunnel as a group, spread out enough that it would be difficult for a Turian unit to take them all out at the same time. It offered less protection to those involved, but speed was of the essence now that the Turians had been alerted to their presence.

Some ten minutes after Nieve and his men began to move again, they reached their objective. The Turian stockpile was in an old bomb shelter that had been dug beneath the level of the tunnels itself, and the stairways down were guarded by a pair of alter looking guards.

Unlike the patrol they'd encountered before, the guards didn't have any flashlights, instead using several large lights that had been set up and were powered by cords running down the stairway into the cache. One was standing on either side of the entrance to the stairwell and both held themselves tensely, ready for everything.

For Nieve, they posed another major problem. It was an old maxim that nothing beat a living pair of eyes for security, and it was proven here. There wasn't any sort of stealthy approach to the two guards, but they both had to be killed quickly and quietly in order for the ODSTs to have enough time to carry out their mission.

It was Hayes who came up with a working suggestion. All of them were carrying the standard issue suppressed M6D pistol as a sidearm. The weapon was powerful enough that suppressed was a relative term, since it was still highly audible and recognizable when one fired. However, as Hayes pointed out, the suppression effect would be enough that the sound of the pistols wouldn't bounce and echo throughout the entire tunnel system.

Nieve agreed, and he brought up the weapon at he already had out at the same time as the others drew theirs from their holsters. Each of the Turian guards was firmly in the sights of two of the helljumpers when he gave the order to fire.

The muffled sound of four shots rang out as one, and were repeated two more times, as each of the ODSTs put three rounds in their target in less than two seconds. The explosive bullets fired by the M6D were almost as loud when they impacted as the pistol was when it fired, but the extra noise was made up for by the force they added to the impact, and the six shots that hit each of Turians was enough to tear open their chests and leave their mangled bodies bleeding out on the floor.

Jones, Hayes and Norris immediately holstered their pistols, switching to the rifles they carried and rushing down the stairs with Hayes in front. Nieve followed more slowly, hauling the prisoner with them. She'd woken up at some point while they were still navigating the tunnels, but she hadn't made a noise, either in pain or an attempt to warn the two guards, and she continued to be silent as Nieve started backwards down the stairs, his own weapon up and covering the entrance.

When he reached the bottom, Nieve realized they'd been lucky. There was a number of cots set up right inside the doorway, but they were all empty, suggesting that the patrol that had been sent out to investigate the sound of their ambush had been stationed with the supplies.

They didn't have to fight any more guards before rigging the supplies to blow, as Jones was frantically doing, while Hayes helped and Norris was stuffing anything that looked interesting or important into his pack, but it meant that they had a limited amount of time before they were discovered.

The moment Jones signaled that all of the explosives where in place, Nieve tried his radio again, but still only got static in response to his hails to command. Someone else must have been listening in, though, because when he was just about to order everyone out so they could detonate anyways, a new voice crackled over the radio.

"Echo One, this is Green Two-One. Interrogative. What are you doing so far behind Turian lines, over?" Green Two-One's voice was female, but it had no soft edges to it, and it snapped across the radio, making it clear that she expected an answer.

"Green Two-One, we're sitting on top of a bird supply cache that's been rigged to explode. Our orders are to detonate only once command tells us to. Over."

"Roger, Echo One. You may detonate as soon as you're ready. Green Two-One out."

Ever since the first active deployment of Spartan IIs just prior to the Human-Covenant war color based designations had been reserved for Spartan teams. Which meant that Nieve had just been cleared to destroy the supplies by a Spartan unit operating relatively close to his location. Probably the same team that had been sent out to take out the Turian HQ.

He wasted no time getting his team out of the bunker, and they began running back down the tunnels until Jones assured them that they were clear. They stopped as one, and Nieve unceremoniously dumped the prisoner on the ground again, watching as Jones readied the detonator.

It was a simple task. He flipped a switch on the side, taking the safety off, and then depressed the single large button. For such an anticlimactic action it produced a noticeable effect. A low rumbling permeated down the tunnel towards them, as did a flash of light from where the fireball of the explosion had raced up the stairs containing it.

The reinforced construction if the bunker all of the supplies had been stored in was enough to prevent any sort of collapse from the explosion, but the helljumpers felt the earth tremble beneath them as the munitions stored in the stockpile lit off in the explosion.

In the moment that they were backlit by the explosion further down the tunnel, a small disk flew towards the helljumpers, unnoticed by everyone until it rebounded off the wall and hit Hayes in the gut. There was a moment of shocked silence as it clattered to the ground, then he shouted, "Grenade!" and threw himself away from it as fast as he could, while the rest of the squad did the same.

It was a much smaller blast than the one that they'd just set off, but in the close confines of the tunnel, the explosion of the grenade as it went off was much worse. Only the automatic polarization of the ODSTs visors prevented it from blinding them, and the shrapnel and force created as it went off was enough to leave all of them reeling, while their systems beeped warnings at them, indicating either lost or low shields.

Hayes and Nieve took the worst of it. Hayes had been closest to the grenade, and it was powerful enough to strip away his shields completely and some of the shrapnel had managed to penetrate the gaps between the hard plates of his armor. Nieve had thrown himself between the prisoner, who'd been dropped on the floor, and the blast. His armor had taken the force of the explosion in the back, and while he was likewise shieldless, all of the shrapnel had either been hit the pack he was wearing, deflecting away from himself, or on the rest of his armor.

He rolled over, ignoring the grunt of pain from the captive beneath him, and brought up his rifle. In the aftermath of the explosion, mass effect rounds were flying down the tunnel in bright streams of red and blue as the Turian patrol they'd been doing their best to avoid engaged them.

They weren't in a good position. Their shields were depleted, and they'd been forced to go prone without much cover while taking fire from a larger group of enemies. The distinctive flashes of the rifles the Turians were using were easy to locate in the distance, but they were putting down enough fire to keep the ODST's heads down.

Nieve started firing at the muzzle flashes he saw, but it didn't seem to make much of a difference, and the neither did the efforts of his squad. The fire coming there way was lighter after they began shooting back, but not by much. They needed to get away from the firefight, and fast.

Out of desperation, he lobbed a plasma grenade towards the attackers. It fell well short of their positions, but the sudden flare of intense blue light seemed to disorient them for a moment.

That moment was all the helljumpers needed. They came to their feet immediately, and began running back down it, away from the Turians. Norris and Nieve each grabbed the prisoner by an arm, dragging her with the m, regardless of her wounded leg, while shooting one handed towards the Turians, putting enough lead in the air to make them keep their heads down.

It worked well enough that they were able to turn their headlong flight into something resembling an orderly withdraw, covering each other in turns. Nieve though he saw a couple of forms drop to the ground and the sheer amount of fire streaking towards them decreased, but he couldn't be sure. It also didn't concern him much. The running fight was bound to draw attention, and he was busy trying to figure out a way to get out of the tunnels.

The squad was now far off of the maps that the marines had been able to compile of the underground, which had never extended further than the supply cache they'd destroyed. Nieve made a blind guess, though, directing them down a side tunnel as they came to it. The Turians weren't far behind, but the entrance to the narrow turnoff turned into a choke point, and the ODSTs slowed down for long enough to pour a stream of fire back the way they'd come accompanied by another grenade.

More Turians dropped to the floor, but Nieve didn't stop running. His guess turned out to be a lucky one when they passed a door with a small emergency light glowing over it. The light illuminated an upwards pointing arrow that had been stenciled onto the door. He ordered the squad to stop, then guestured to the door.

Jones didn't hesitate for a second. While the rest of the squad covered him, he turned and kicked the door as hard as he could. It gave a little, but didn't burst open the way he'd planned. The space was to confined for a breaching charge, though, so he just kicked the door again, and kept kicking.

It gave on the fifth kick, and slammed open to reveal a narrow shaft with a ladder mounted against one wall, running up into the darkness. It was, Nieve quickly surmised, a maintenance access shaft of some sort and their best hope of getting out alive.

Hayes went up first, climbing the ladder as fast as he could. Nieve went second, and brought the prisoner with him. She had difficulty on the ladder, slowing them all down, but she didn't resist. After the two of them came Jones and Norris.

From Nieve's perspective, the ladder seemed to go on without end, rising into a blackness that even the night vision built into his helmet couldn't penetrate. He kept going, though, looking down occasionally to check that the rest were still behind him.

During one of his glances back, he saw a pinprick of a flash, before a bright red round raced up the shaft towards him. It missed, but the Turians had reached the base of the shaft and were shooting up at them. They were almost invisible in the darkness, but the location of the ladder made it clear where they would be, and some of the shots were disturbingly accurate.

"Fire in the hole." Norris said, sounding practically bored, and something clattered off the wall of the shaft beneath him. Three seconds later, the grenade he dropped exploded at the base of the shaft, and a wave of pressure blasted upwards in the narrow confines, shaking ladder and throwing the prisoner off. Jones' outflung arm caught her, and he hauled her back up with him by main force.

After nearly a hundred feet of climbing, Hayes stopped, forcing the rest of the party to stop with him. They'd reached the top of the shaft. The radioman pushed one arm up against the covering over the top of the shaft, and it shifted slightly, letting a thing streamer of light in. He continued to lift gently, peering out from beneath the covering until he could be sure that there was no one nearby.

When he finished observing the surroundings of the entrance, he pushed up all the way, shoving the cover to one side, and climbed out of the shaft. The rest of the squad came out after him, with Jones pulling the prisoner out when her leg made it impossible to get out on her own.

"Right. We need to find a place to bunker down and call command." Nieve spoke, and all of the other ODSTs nodded in agreement. "This has turned into a massive charlie foxtrot, and I don't think we can get back on our own."

* * *

><p>AN: It seems like every chapter I write surpasses the previous record for length by a couple hundred words. This one also holds the record for longest continual scene without a timeskip.

One question you probably have is "Why is the Asari just going along with them?" There are reasons, don't worry. They'll get explored in the next chapter. Until then, feel free to speculate. I'm not saying anything.

Also, the Spartans seem to be rather fond of formal radio discipline, don't they? Just one of their quirks.

-PT246


	11. SVN7

I'm not dead! It's amazing, I know.

* * *

><p><em>Chapter Nine: Sierra Victor November Seven<em>

[09:52 Zulu [04:25 Local], Dec 7, 2649 [Military Calendar]/

5 Km behind Turian Lines, Sector 42 Lexni/

Trayus, Trayus System]

The building they'd holed up in was quiet. It had been abandoned some time ago, probably not long after the majority of it had been torn apart, leaving only the bottom two levels marginally intact. The damage had probably been done by a bombing run, since much of the area around the ruins had been reduced to a similar state, accompanied by scorched craters filled with rubble and bodies.

Here and there some flames still flickered in the wreckage but nothing besides the helljumpers moved through the barren landscape, a mute testimony to the devastation wrought by the UNSC. There were undoubtedly Turians nearby, but none of the ODSTs could see any.

Nieve dumped the prisoner on the floor in a central room where the ceiling was still partially intact, giving them both some cover while the rest of the squad spread out taking defensive positions throughout the ruin. It wasn't the best place to have to hold while waiting for extraction, but they weren't spoiled for choice.

The prisoner let out a soft grunt as she hit the ground, but she didn't say anything. She hadn't said anything since they'd found her or during the running gun battle with the Turians that had followed shortly after and left them trapped behind enemy lines.

Now, she pulled herself slowly upright until her back was leaning against a fragment of wall, both of her legs extended out in front of her.

Nieve took a moment to examine her more closely. They hadn't taken her helmet off, so he couldn't see what was behind it, but the helmet itself and the rest of her armor told him a great deal about her. The paint was chipped and scratched, with a dull metal showing through, suggesting it had seen hard use. There was one dent in particular that stood out, right above the visor. Small burnt streaks extended out from it where the helmet had shrugged of a direct headshot by some sort of incendiary round.

The dent distorted the device painted on the armor, warping it out of shape, but it was also repeated on one of the shoulders plates, and again, much smaller this time, on the chest. A circle, with a stylized, upside down chevron made up of six pieces rising above it. Nieve guessed it was some sort of unit insignia, but he couldn't be certain.

Otherwise, nothing stood out about her other than her legs. Three different holes had been punched through her armor by rounds from Nieve and Norris' rifles when they'd captured her in the tunnels. There, they hadn't been able to see that her blood was blue, not red, but in the light it was evident from the stains around the wounds.

They'd been filled with biofoam and she wasn't in any immediate danger, so Nieve decided to leave her where she was, with her hands bound and her legs crippled, as he went to check on the rest of the squad.

Jones was by the largest gap in the outer wall—the one the ODSTs had entered through. He was using the remaining explosives in his pack to create an improvised minefield covering the exit, one that could be detonated on command. He'd also started to set up a position covering the entrance using pieces of damaged furniture and chunks of the shattered wall to make cover for himself while he defended the wall.

Nieve found Norris on the remains of the upper story. He was lying prone, with the barrel of his rifle jutting through a much smaller hole that he'd smashed in the wall, giving him a large field of fire. Nieve found himself regretting ordering him to take one of the battle rifles instead of the much larger and more powerful sniper rifle he preferred, but he'd felt that the sniper rifle would be to inconvenient for the tunnels they'd had to fight through. Now Norris was going to do his best as a sharpshooter, but it wouldn't have the same effect.

He located Hayes last. The radioman was ready to defend the next major entrance into the ruined structure, but when Nieve found him he was fiddling with his back mounted field radio. The radio looked similar to those used by soldiers for the last seven hundred years, since before what had been naively termed World War Two, but it was far more powerful than they had been, capable of reaching around most of a planet or even into space.

"Got anything?"

"Yeah. Greatsword's online. Actual wants to talk to you." Hayes said, "Looks like we were too deep in the tunnels to get through to them, but reception's fine up here."

Nieve nodded, before activating his own helmet radio, tying it in to Hayes' unit.

"Greatsword, this is Echo One, over."

"Echo One, this is Greatsword Actual." The battalion CO for the 1/3rd was speaking personally with Nieve. "Report."

"Primary objective accomplished. The supply cache has been destroyed. Exfil was compromised by a bird patrol. We got clear, but we have wounded, and one prisoner, over."

"Repeat that last, Echo One."

"One prisoner, Greatsword." Nieve clarified. "Non-turian, humanoid. Military grade weapons and armor, but working alone. Didn't make any attempt to contact the patrol, despite several opportunities. Hasn't offered any resistance since she was captured."

"She, Echo One?" Radio encryption tended to flatten voices and take out the emotion, but the colonel's curiosity was clear enough.

"Yes, sir. Looks female. We can't confirm that, though."

"Roger, Echo One." Greatsword paused briefly. "We have a trace on your signal. You're five clicks behind enemy lines, with the heaviest fighting in the city between you and us. We can't get you out. Bunker down, and I'll pass this up to division. That prisoner ought to be enough to get you a ticket out. In the meantime, you'll have a priority on fire support. Greatsword out."

They were stuck. There was no way they could make it to friendly territory with the prisoner, but it sounded like Greatsword though she was enough of a priority to try and get extraction sent to them. They just had to wait, and to survive.

"Alright, listen up, team." Nieve opened a channel to the squad. "Greatsword can't exfil us. The fighting's too heavy. They're giving us arty instead, and maybe air, if it can get through all of the triple A out there. Actual said he'd try and get us help from division, but there's no word on how long that'll take. Watch the approaches. We don't know if the birds know we're here or not, and we can't count on being left alone."

"Any orbital?" Norris asked.

"Negative. We could call it, but by the time we see anyone in that mess out there, we'll be well within the kill range." Nieve responded. He would only authorize orbital fire if they were overrun and could take a significant number of Turians with them.

He made his way back to the room where he'd left the prisoner. She'd moved a bit, shifting her weight to take some of the pressure of her bound hands, but was still sitting against the wall.

Nieve went down to one knee in front of her before reaching out and taking her helmet in his hands. He felt along the surface, looking for the release—he wanted to see her face. His fingers found the small button, and he pressed it.

There was a soft click, and the faceplate of the helmet retracted. At the same time, the tubes that ran from the back of the helmet to the back of her armor detached, leaving him free to pull it off.

The face that looked back at him was almost human. It had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, and a similar facial structure. That was where the similarities ended. Her face was a pale shade of blue, and instead of hair, she had some sort of tendrils running back over the top of her skull.

She looked at him, without saying anything. Her eyes bored into his visor, as though trying to see what lay beyond it. Nieve considered depolarizing the visor, but he was distracted by Norris.

"Nieve, there's a Turian watching us. Wearing civvies, as far as I can tell, but armed. He's got one of those computer things on his arm, too, and he's using it."

"Damn. We can't afford any to take any risks. Take him out, and hope he didn't call our location in. Everyone else, get ready. We may have incoming soon."

"Roger that, Sarge. Any trouble with the prisoner?" Jones asked as a shot rang out above their heads.

"Negative."

"Then you should probably find a spot to shoot from. Interrogate her when we're not waiting to be attacked."

"Yeah." He stood up again, and picked up his rifle from where he'd left it just out of her reach. "You know, I though I was in charge of this squad, Jones."

"Someone's got to remind you to keep your head in the game, Sarge, and Norris was busy." Jones replied.

"Uh-huh. Fuck you, Jones." After a moment of though, Nieve lent over the prisoner and slid the helmet back onto her head, giving her some additional protection from stray rounds.

For about fifteen minutes, nothing happened. The ruins around the building were still and there was no sign that anything was moving through them when Hayes got a message over the radio. He listened to it but decided it wasn't worth putting Nieve on the line, and summarized it to him instead.

"Good news, bad news time, Sarge. Division can't get us out right away either, since they're tied up all over the city. They decided we were important enough to give us reinforcements, though.

"They're tapping the orbital reserve, and dropping a platoon by HEV pod. The bad news is that it's going to take time to get them into position. They were gearing up for a drop halfway across the planet when they got retasked. We've got half an hour."

"Roger that." Nieve replied, turning to look out over the ruins. As he did, he saw something move. It was just a brief flicker, but when it happened again, he took a closer look at the area where it had happened. "Birds moving through the rubble. Norris, the broken red wall at five o'clock, two of them."

Norris' rifle barked twice from the upper level. "Correction. One of them." He fired again. "Bird down. Both were military this time. We've got incoming."

The eerie half light of false dawn gave way to bright flashes and streams of color as fire from the Turians lanced outwards to the house. They'd been moving up the cover provided by the wreckage surrounding the ODST's refuge, and it was only luck that Nieve had noticed them.

"Fuck! Shoot the closest ones first, and work outwards from there. If you think we need arty, call it in." Nieve followed his own orders, bringing up his rifle and drawing a bead on the nearest Turian he could see. The next time it rose shot at him, Nieve shot back. The Turian missed, but he didn't.

The fighting quickly dissolved into a messy brawl. The air was filled with rounds streaking towards the house, while the humans inside replied with tight bursts of fire whenever a target presented itself. Norris wreaked havoc on the attacking Turians from his vantage point, killing them when they though they were safely behind cover, or when their shields went down. Sharpshooting wasn't the same as sniping, and he missed his rifle, but he'd been a designated marksman before, and he settled back into that role easily.

The other ODSTs were reduced to shooting at anything that moved and they did it very well. No one ascended to the lofty heights of any UNSC Special Forces unit without being an expert shot, and they proved it. Nieve, Jones, and Hayes paid no attention to the chips that burst outwards from the impact of the Turians' rounds on the walls as they fired repeatedly, making every shot count as best they could.

The Turian advance was relentless. They moved from cover to cover in pairs, ensuring that there was always someone keeping the helljumper's heads down by weight of fire. At least one of the squads attacking them had brought a light machine gun that was highly effective until Norris shot it. His bullet hit the LMG in the cooling vents, destroying them and making the weapon overheat.

Even with the Nieve's squad giving it their best, they were in danger of being overrun. They were elite troops, but they were facing at least a platoon of Turians, and more were doubtlessly on the way. The sheer volume of incoming fire guaranteed that they would be killed, sooner or later, unless something happened to turn the tables, and quickly.

That something arrived when the forward most Turians were within ten feet of the ruined building. The air around them shook and rubble rattled with the force of the roar of sound coming from HEV pods breaking atmosphere. The UNSC reinforcements were making planetfall with style.

The pods streaked earthwards and impacted with terrifying force, pulverizing anything in their path as a full platoon of deployed in support of their trapped brethren.

Nieve had participated in a great many orbital drops before, but he'd never been on the receiving end of one. He suddenly had a new appreciation for the raw terror invoked by the knowledge that each one of those tremendous, earthshaking concussions was a soldier, deployed from the cold vacuum of space straight to the ground, ready to kill.

Forty-one ODSTs emerged from their HEV pods almost as one, their weapons firing at any Turians they could see as the moved through the ruins from their pods to Nieve's position. Nieve and the rest of his men gave them what covering fire they could, but the Turians had the sense to keep their heads down and out of sight from the ruins as best they could.

Only one squad of the newly arrived Helljumpers joined Nieve and his unit in the building. Half of them joined Norris on the top floor, taking advantage of the better lines of fire it offered, while the rest spread out to cover the entrances, ignoring the occasional round that hissed through air towards them.

The other two squads spread out through the ruins in the area immediately around Nieve's position, digging into the rubble, and forming a perimeter that the Turians would find hard to breach under the watchful eyes of their NCO's. As they did, Norris noted that someone had had the forethought to bring along a pair of machine guns—M452's, nothing too heavy—per squad. Given that ODSTs were a force meant to strike quickly, either at the spearhead of an assault, as on the spot reinforcements, or behind enemy lines, they normally didn't bother with them, but he was glad someone had made the decision to take them.

Two of the newcomers moved from the outer line towards the building. Since his HUD flagged them as a Lieutenant Brambley and Staff Sergeant Murphy, Nieve figured they were looking for him, and met them at the remains of the doorway.

"Alright, Nieve, anything we need to know?" Brambley asked as he arrived, stepping into the shelter provided by the battered walls of the building.

"Nothing particularly special, sir. Looks like you finished off the bird platoon having a go at us, but they'll probably be back."

Murphy nodded his agreement with Nieve before chipping in. "Good. We brought more than enough ammo to deal with them. Enough to resupply your guys, too."

Bramblry added, "The brass said it'll be awhile before they can get anyone through to us. They're organizing a ground convoy, but with all the shit is has to punch through, they have no real idea when it will get here."

"Or, that's what they said when you fieldstrip the jargon and bullshit out and get down to what really matters." Murphy's commentary alone was enough to make Nieve like the man. "In short, we're holding here as long as it takes. They seem to have decided that the prisoner you captured is worth keeping.

"Who knows, if we stay here long enough, they may get to discover the number you pulled on the ammo dump. I'd like to see the bird quartermaster's face when—Get down!"

Dust and debris dropped from the remains of the ceiling, adding to the coat that already covered Nieve, and giving Brabley and Murhpy the beginnings of their own covering, accompanied by a detonation overhead.

"Fucking mortars! The damn things are way to fucking quiet in the air. How the hell did you hear them, Murphy?"

Murphy pointed to a shamrock painted on the stock of his rifle. "Good old fashioned Irish luck plus just a bit of experience. My squad got hit by a mortar barrage, back on Shanxi."

Nieve frowned, brushing of the staff sergeants flippant reply. Something wasn't right. It took him a moment to figure out what it was—Norris hadn't reported in after the hit. He turned, leaving the other two behind, and sprinted up the stairs, ignoring the way they creaked ominously beneath him.

The second floor hadn't been in particularly good shape to start with, but the mortar strike had left scorched black crater in the concrete, and nowhere did the remains of the walls rise higher than two feet.

Several of the ODSTs who'd taken positions up top weren't in much better condition. One of the privates had had both of his legs blown off, and the only reason Nieve couldn't here his screaming was that he'd fallen unconscious. His squadmates surrounded him, two applying tourniquets—one to each leg, trying desperately to stem the spurting red flow from them.

Norris had been near the center of the blast. There wasn't much left for Nieve to see. His body was covered in shrapnel wounds, and blood leaked slowly from them to join the spreading pool on the ground.

Nieve ignored the blood, kneeling down beside his friend's body. Checking for vital signs was pointless, but he did it anyways, unable to simply accept that he was gone. After a moment he pulled Norris' dog tags from around his neck, and slipped it into one his equipment pouches before walking back downstairs.

"How bad?" Brambley asked, when Norris reached him.

"Bad. I don't know if we can take another hit like that. One of mine is KIA, and one of yours is down. Alive, but out of the fight."

"I've got another question. Why the hell haven't they hit us again?" No sooner had Murphy spoken then he was answered by the sound of an incoming round, followed by as dull crump as it exploded. More shells came hard on the heels of the first.

Brambley shouted into his radio, ordering everyone off the roof, ASAP, before rounding on Murphy. "Why the fuck would you ask a question like that, Staff Sergeant? It's like saying 'What's the worst that could happen?' before a drop."

Murphy didn't get a chance to reply, because the Turian infantry choose that moment to attack, and the helljumpers manning the machine guns began to reply enthusiastically. He ran outside to oversee the outer defense, while Nieve calmly swapped out the magazine in his rifle for a fresh one and Brambley started shooting out of the doorway, covering his platoon sergeant.

The rest of the fighting passed in numb blur for Nieve. He fought mechanically, shooting at any target he could see, killing Turians as dispassionately as the mortar round had killed Norris.

Once or twice, he vaguely noticed Sabre fighter screaming overhead, dropping bombs and making gun runs on the Turians attacking them. He saw Hayes talking into the radio almost continuously, calling for artillery and talking the fighter pilots onto their targets methodically, ignoring all of the fire peppering wall he was sheltering behind.

The men beside him kept changing, as more and more were hit and pulled back into the build he'd taken hours ago. It didn't matter to him, because every one of them was an ODST, and any ODST was confident that any other ODST would have his back.

It took hours to for the fighting to die down, and it wasn't until then that he began to notice everything around him again. The floor was covered in spent brass and injured men, and the wall he'd been using for cover was so perforated that it barely deserved the term anymore. Outside, rays of sunlight cut through the smoke that filled the air, illuminating the charnel house that the ruins surrounding them had become.

Dead and wounded from both sides covered the ground. Here and there, the lay side by side, from where the turians had tried to storm their lines and failed. A half dozen wrecked tanks burned fitfully in the rubble, shattered by bombs or the rockets some of the helljumpers had brought.

Brambley was dead, killed by a grenade, and almost half of his platoon had joined him in death. Miraculously, none of Nieve's remaining men had been killed, and Murphy was still alive, despite being the last back from the outer defenses his men had established.

The reason for the sudden drop in the number of Turians attacking them quickly became apparent as a Keyes MBT rolled out from the shadows between two half demolished buildings, it's main gun roaring, followed by another, leading a column of APCs. Infantry ranged around them, occasionally stopping to return fire as the retreating Turians shot at them.

Ahead of them, was another group of infantry, instantly distinguishable from the marines guarding the rescue convoy and the battered helljumpers. There were only three of them, but the distinctive profile of MJOLNIR had remained deliberately unchanged for a century, making Spartans stand out wherever they took the field.

They led the reinforcements down to the beleaguered force of ODSTs, ruthlessly dispatching any Turians they encountered in seconds. Nieve would never admit it, but the sight of them moving effortlessly through battlefield was enough to make his knees go weak with relief. He sank slowly to the floor, leaning back against the wall that had been the only thing keeping him alive for hours, letting go of his weapon for the first time in ages.

The Spartans were the first into the building. Two of them immediately headed for the alien prisoner, securing her, while the third turned towards him, wordlessly offering a hand up. He accepted and let himself be pulled to his feet. Even then, the top of his head barely came to the Spartan's chin, and he looked up into the faceplate of the individual his HUD only identified as 'GREEN 2-1; LTJG SVN7/I-S'.

"Thanks, Lieutenant." It was a simple statement, but for an ODST to offer thanks to a Spartan was practically unheard of.

The voice that responded was, surprisingly enough to Nieve, female. Under all of that armor, he wouldn't have been able to guess, but he'd assumed that the Spartan was a man, if that term could still be used on the enhanced super soldiers.

"No problem, Sergeant. And by the way, it's Shepard."

* * *

><p>AN: Well, I hope that was worth the wait. This chapter was stuck at the point where the ODST reinforcements make landfall for months, and then I finally got back to it (Writer's block and college go hand in hand for making stories not happen, sometimes), and hashed out the rest in about two days.

There are lots of things that I could say to try and justify the delay, but I see no point in trying. It just happens sometimes. I do have the beginning of the next chapter written, which makes its somewhat timely arrival likely, but at this point I make no promises.

I promised you the Asari Spectre's story, but I found it just didn't fit in this chapter. I do know it, and I know precisely who she is, but I don't know when exactly that will come out. It's important though, I'll say that much.

One last thing I wanted to address, since I have no idea if I'll be able to fit it into the story: Shepard's ID number. It's not just a string of letters, it actually has a meaning that I thought out, though most of it was just an excuse to include N7 in there somewhere.

"SV" is Spartan V. This program's been so successful that they haven't changed it significantly for a while, and there are a bunch of SVs floating around. "N7" is the training batch number, for lack of a better term. 7th training unit, N iteration (that would be 14th). There are 10 units, 0-9, per iteration. "/I" is the personal specialty. In this case infiltrator, though it should be pointed out that Spartan infiltrators are certainly more than capable in a stand up fight, as well as doing what they do best. I think you can all guess what that last S is for.

Clearly, the Spartan program has changed some since the last time we saw it, back in the Human-Covenant War.

The more you know.

Oh, yeah. If anyone feels like providing a cover illustration for Convergence, feel free to PM me. Also, given that the violence is getting worse and the characters are swearing more, the story rating is being upped to M.

-PT246


	12. Aftermath

_Chapter 10: Aftermath_

[15:12 Zulu [09:45 Local], Dec 7, 2649 [Military Calendar]/

En Route to 3rd Division CP, Lexni/

Trayus, Trayus System]

The trip back to back to UNSC lines was hellish, terrifying, and heavily contested by the Turians. Nieve didn't care. He rode out on a Salamander APC, under the protection of it's guns and the Keyes tanks escorting the column. The tanks' cannons roared almost continuously, and were joined by the chatter of machine guns, while the lighter fire from the marines inside and around the APCs blended together into one never ending sound.

The group tasked with rescuing the stranded ODSTs had punched through the heaviest fighting planetside to bring them back, and it showed. None of the vehicles were undamaged, and they passed several engulfed by flames, evidence of the Turian's resistance.

The aliens had been trying to plug the gap in their lines the armor had left, but the humans fought just as hard to get back as they had to get through in the first place, caching the units moving into position off guard and shattering them.

The inside of the Salamander was hot, cramped, and Nieve knew that if he took off his helmet it would reek of cordite and unwashed bodies. The marines and helljumpers were pressed up against each other, managing to pack more men and women into the APC than the original designers would have though possible.

At the moment, though, Nieve was just grateful that the Spartans had walked the whole way in, fighting ceaselessly, and were going out the exact same way. Trying to fit them inside with everyone else would have been impossible, and no one wanted to use the handholds on the outside to cling on under the sort of fire the Turians were laying down.

The only clear space in the transport was where Norris' body had been placed, along with several others. The UNSC had learned long ago that sometimes you had to leave the dead behind, but whenever possible they tried to bring them back, and the helljumpers had insisted on making room for their fallen, and each of the APCs carried a grim cargo of dead or wounded as well as the living.

To make things worse, some of the wounded were close to death, and there was little that could be done for them. The corpsmen who had come with the marines did their best, but almost half of the ODSTs had been killed, and most of the rest were wounded to one degree or another, straining their resources.

Even the prisoner had been thrown into the APC on top of the bodies. The corpsmen hadn't done much for her, leaving the biofoam in her legs alone, just making sure she wouldn't bleed out before the ONI spooks got a chance to interrogate her.

Eventually, the column ground to a halt, the marines spilling out of the Salamanders onto the cracked and pitted pavement. Nieve was the last man out of his APC, one hand keeping his rifle casually pointed at the ground, while he half dragged, half supported the prisoner with the other.

"Sergeant." An officer waived him over towards a contingent of fresh marines. "We'll take her from here."

"Sir." Nieve replied, noting that the man's name was withheld on his IFF tag. He handed the prisoner over to the colonel's escorts, who took her wordlessly and left. He didn't ask where they were going.

The colonel watched for a moment, then followed, leaving Nieve standing alone, until Hayes and Jones came over to him.

"Come one, Sarge. We've got places to be."

"Yeah, sorry. I was out of it for a moment there."

The three soldiers slung their weapons on their backs and turned away, walking back to the APCs that were still the center of activity. For a few minutes they simply stood and watched, happy to let someone else do the heavy lifting for once.

All that changed when they started removing the dead from the vehicles. The bodies were manhandled out of the cramped spaces and dragged to the side, lined up in rows on the concrete. A pair of marines pulled a corpse from the nearest Salamander and dumped it on the ground for another team to take care of.

They didn't get the chance. Nieve, Hayes and Jones stepped over to the shrapnel ridden body, and gently lifted it. The ODSTs carried the body of their fallen comrade to the lines of the dead and slowly placed it on the ground. Hayes unsealed Norris' helmet and slid it off, placing it beside his head, before closing his friend's startlingly green eyes one last time. Nieve removed a tattered 105th Division flag from a compartment on his armor, and Jones helped him unfold it and spread it across Norris.

They didn't say anything, because there was nothing to say. Each of the veteran troopers had lost friends before, and each knew it could happen again. They would, in time, hold a small memorial service for Norris, but for the moment all they could give him was a respectful silence.

Hayes and Jones were the first to leave, each walking off in separate directions. There would be a debriefing later, but in the chaos of the convoy's return, they slipped of quietly, knowing that someone would find them when they were needed.

Nieve sat beside his friend's body, quietly reflecting on how quickly they'd gotten to know eachother after his transfer into the unit. No one saw the tears sliding down his face, hidden by the tinted visor of his helmet.

"Sergeant Nieve." He wasn't sure how much time had passed when someone put a hand on his shoulder.

"Yeah?"

"There's something you should see, sergeant."

He looked up for the first time and saw standing over him an older man in unadorned combat armor. His HUD displayed the man's IFF tag, but he didn't need to read it to know who was talking to him. Major General Hajek was a rising star in the Marine Corps, and had been selected to command the 3rd division following his performance on Shanxi.

Nieve didn't know why the general was addressing him personally, but he knew better than to refuse. Hajek gave him a hand up, and walked with him to the edge of the camp, where they stood, looking out over the ruined city of Lexni, in defiance of any Turian snipers who might have been watching.

"Your squad did a hell of a thing, Nieve," Hajek said, "and that might have been enough to break the birds here. Between the destruction of the ammo dump, the hole we had to punch in their lines to get you back, and the Spartan's raid on their CP, they've got to be reeling. The rest of the third is moving to exploit that, and fifth and fourteenth on our flanks are moving with us.

"There's also the prisoner you brought back. Other units have found bodies that aren't human or turian in the rubble but this is the first live one we've gotten. Hopefully ONI can get her to open up about what's going on here, but even if they can't we'll just keep fighting."

Nieve grunted. It was not something one generally did in the presence of senior officers, but he was to tired to care, and he couldn't think of a better way to express his opinion on the prisoner.

Hajek smiled at that. "I thought you might feel that way. But I didn't just bring you here to discuss the consequences of your mission. There'll be enough of that later on." The general began to speak louder, making himself heard over a growing subsonic roar. "The attack's just starting, and I wanted you to see this, sergeant, because it's changing the rules of the game in a way they'll never see coming." Hajek's smile had turned into a predator's grin as a shadow came between them and the sun.

He pointed upwards, and Nieve followed the line of his arm and saw a massive, curved purple shape diving down in the sky. A century ago, the spectacle would have been a UNSC infantryman's terror but Nieve found himself grinning along with the general as the Sanghelli Empire battlecruiser roared overhead, two others falling into position astern of it, the plasma projectors on their undersides glowing brightly while dropships and fighters streamed from their open hangars.

Even from several miles away the strikes were blinding. Plasma lanced downwards, vaporizing everything in its path in expanding clouds of pure white energy. Hajek held up an arm to shield his eyes from the light, while Nieve's visor became almost opaque to compensate.

Seconds later the sound reached them. It was indescribable, the sound of a plasma rifle magnified a thousand fold, at the same time accompanied by a chilling, heart stopping bass rumble. It was the sound of an angry god calling for war and the answering chorus of ten thousand lesser weapons decrying mankind's vengeance for Shanxi and the terrifying wrath of their allies.

"Come, General," Nieve turned to see a hunched figure on digitigrades legs behind him, all four mandibles spread in anticipation, "it begins!"

* * *

><p>AN: And here we have it: the triumphant ending of act two. The UNSC and the SE have made their response to the Turian's first strike, and things are only going to escalate from here.

This chapter was a little short, I know, but I had a great deal of trouble figuring out how to wrap this section up. While this is the only version that got written, there were several different things that I was considering, before I scrapped the ideas. After all, you don't need to see the debriefing for the mission, since you already saw the mission itself.

There's something else you need to know—a decision I made a while back that affects Convergence. My original plans for this fic included a retelling of the Mass Effect Trilogy in addition to setting the stage with a section on the second contact war.

Well, nothing ever seems to go as planned, and this turned into a war fic, focusing on the first clash between the Halo and Mass Effect universes. As such I'm officially announcing that this fic _will not_ continue after the war.

Such an undertaking would be herculean in terms of time and effort, since there's simply so much in both universes to build on in order to create a tale worthy of what I'm doing here. It's an acknowledged fact by this point that I am anything but a fast writer—it's taken me more than a year to churn out about 26,00 words, and I feel the need to bring this to a close.

It won't happen for a while yet, because I have plans for a third act at least the length of the second one, but narrative wise Convergence is past it's halfway point, and will begin winding down to it's ending. (Winding down is not the best word for that I have in mind, but it'll do for now.)

Alright, I'm done talking at you. Thanks for sticking with me this long, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the ride.

-PT246


	13. Interlude II: Consequences

_Interlude II: Consequences  
><em>

_[Transcript:[DATE REDACTED], UNSC HIGHCOM]_

_Chairman, UNSC Security Council [Chief of Naval Operations]: _Bob, what do you have for me?

_Director, ONI:_ We picked up a prisoner on Trayus and she's singing. Not a turian, they don't break. Some new species, called Asari.

She's talking without any sort of pressure. As far as we can tell, she's some sort of observer who happened to run into a squad of ODSTs, which was a stroke of luck for us. She works for intergalactic government-yes, you heard that right. This is bigger than we thought.

_Chairman: _Does that mean we're going to be fighting more than one galactic civilization at once? Or God forbid, a Covenant analogue?

_ONI: _We're lucky in that regard, Drake. She says that this is a unilateral action by the Turian Hierarchy, with the other two council races—The Asari and the Salarians—as well as the council itself remaining officially neutral.

_Arbiter, SE: _The cowards hide behind false neutrality. If they truly did not support this war they would have done something about it.

_Vice Chairman, UNSC [VCNO]:_ I agree with Thel. Nonetheless, we're still fighting the Jackals and the Brutes. It would be safer to respect that neutrality as best we can, or we risk becoming overextended.

_Ground Forces, UNSC [Commandant, UNSC Marine Corps]: _He's right. Even with the Sangheili Empire picking up the slack against the Covenant Remnant and providing support for operations against the Turians, we're in a position where we don't want to risk angering other civilizations, especially since we don't know the extent of their forces.

Bob, what _do_ we know about the Council and their forces?

_Director: _Not as much as I'd like, Maria, but more than they'd like us to know. The prisoner's willing to explain their systems of government and culture, but won't talk about anything military. I'm certain she knows more than she's saying, but for now we're just happy to have a willing asset of any sort.

On the other hand, Spartan 117 and the AI Cortana were successful in their boarding operations over Trayus. They managed to secure a great deal of data from several wrecked Turian ships, and their encryption was almost pathetically weak when faced with smart AIs.

A great deal of what we got was corrupted or damaged to the point of uselessness, but 117 boarded enough ships with varying levels of data integrity, and my analysts were able to put what he found together fairly well, so we have a decent idea.

In short we're in a shooting war with the biggest military power in Citadel space. The Turian fleet is as large as the Asari and the Salarians put together. The other two council races would be problematic in a fight, but we could beat them if we absolutely had to. It would probably require instituting a full wartime draft, the mobilization of every reservist who's not on the front and activating mothballed ships and gear in storage, but we could do it.

_[Pause]_

_Chairman:_ I think Maria and Anton are right. Let's try to avoid pissing them off for the moment. Now, I've had my people working on a concept for how to take the fight to the Turians. Have you ever heard the term 'island hopping'?

_[Transcript Ends]_

* * *

><p><em>[Citadel Council Meeting Audio Records]<em>

_Councilor Nostros_: What the _hell_ happened at Trayus, Pallin?

_Councilor Pallin:_ I just spoke with Primarch Varkus, and even he doesn't know for sure. I doubt even the STG has a better idea.

_Councilor Kirosa: _Correct. No STG teams were present in Trayus. We do know that whatever happened has the Hierarchy's high command worried, but that is the extent of our knowledge.

_Nostros:_ Everything we have suggests that it was an outright disaster. Would you care to clarify?

_Pallin: [Sigh]_ They surprised us. The humans appear to have a form of FTL technology that isn't based on mass effect fields, and they used it to ambush fourth fleet. Only a few frigates managed to get away by going to FTL and then executing emergency transits from the nearest secure relay.

We thought their ships were pushovers after the first engagement, but were taught otherwise when they retook Shanxi. We never expected anything like what happened above Trayus, though. Warships like we've never see before, larger than the _Destiny Ascention_, some by significant margins, and in fleet strength.

The ground battle was almost as bad. It dwarfed the conflict on Shanxi by a significant marigin. Within the first hour advance troops who were dropped directly from orbit had taken out anti-air defenses covering a significant area—

_Nostros:_ Did you say that advance troops were dropped directly from _orbit_?

_Pallin:_ I did. It's insane, but the first wave made landfall in single man pods launched from orbiting warships. Entire battalions of them were on the ground before we could react, and more conventional forces followed as soon as landing zones were secured and the AA was down.

_Kirosa:_ Intriguing—A high risk, high reward insertion strategy. I wonder how they accomplished it. Must forward tactic to STG for analysis.

_Pallin: _What followed was a conventional city fight for the next eight days. The final transmission from the garrison indicates that the humans resorted to tactical orbital bombardment with some sort of plasma weapon from several ships of unknown design, followed by a ground assault in all sectors reinforced by several species that had never been seen before.

The garrison commander was cut of mid-transmission, and we haven't heard anything since. Our official position is that Trayus is lost to us.

_Kirosa:_ The human willingness to use orbital weapons is worrying. It suggests less restraint in warfare. It is, however, consistent with the data the Hierarchy retrieved on Shanxi about a genocidal war for survival.

_Nostros_: I think 'worrying' is putting it lightly. Kinetic strikes are bad enough but the devastation from a plasma bombardment, even a limited scale one, must be horrifying. It does explain the disappearance of T'Soni.

Pallin, I think your Government may have gotten in over its head. If the humans have allies who are willing to support them and as militant as humanity itself seems to be—

_Pallin:_ We'll handle it. Why wasn't I informed that T'Soni had been sent to Trayus?

_Kirosa:_ We're as capable as the Hierarchy of predicting the next logical target, so we dispatched our resident first contact expert to see what she could learn about the humans. The more information we have about them, the better.

_Nostros:_ The decision was made to keep her presence covert because we wanted her judgment, not the Hierarchy's opinion. And now, we've lost her.

Nonetheless, we have enough information to come to a decision: Kirosa and I have advised our governments to remain neutral, and we will not commit the Council itself to war, either.

_[Record Ends]_

* * *

><p><em>[DOSSIER: T'SONI, LIARA]<em>

_AFFILIATION: CITADEL SPECIAL TACTICS AND RECONNAISSANCE _

_HISTORY [EXCERPT]: Dr. T'Soni graduated from the University of Thessia with honors and a doctorate in Prothean Archeology in 2148 _[Translator's note: All dates rendered under the human system, Common Era] _at the age of seventy _[tr. standard earth years]_, one of the youngest to do so. Her work in the field, while exceptional, was mostly ignored by the community of prothean experts within Citadel Space, for a number of reasons. First and foremost was her age—As long lived as Asari are, they tend to add less weight to the statements made by their fellows who are not matriarchs. Dr. T'Soni was also a leading proponent of a theory suggesting that the protheans did not simply die off, and were instead rendered extinct by other means, a theory that was dismissed by most other experts in the field._

_In 2250, after just over a hundred years spent mostly on archeological digs, Dr. T'Soni's was shortlisted for induction into the SPECTREs. The file on her application is restricted, but what is known is that at some point she acquired extensive, commando grade training. Her reasons for joining the SPECTREs are also unknown, though rumors abound. Many of these suggest that she discovered something on one of her expeditions to that made her decided that she needed to take a more active role in galactic politics, but this remains unconfirmed._

_With the vocal support of Counselor Tevos, Matriarch Benezia and Matriarch Aethyta Dr. T'Soni was inducted into the SPECTREs in early 2251 after completing several trial missions under the supervision of Nhilus Kyrik, and elderly Turian SPECTRE who served as her mentor for the first several years of her time in the SPECTREs._

_Dr. T'Soni's exploits in her early years as a SPECTRE remain highly classified and little information about them has been made public, beginning her trend of working sub rosa. In this period the only operation that stands out occurred in 2274, when Dr. T'Soni led a multi-species team in a month long pursuit of the rogue agent Tela Vasir, who had been stripped of her SPECTRE status following an investigation of the bombing of an office complex on Illium. The operation concluded with the death of Vasir and the downfall of the entity known as the Shadow Broker in a violent boarding action over a planet that has never been specified. Dr. T'Soni and former C SEC agent Garrus Vakarian remain the only known survivors of the primary team in the hunt for Vasir._

_In the past two centuries, Dr. T'Soni has become a more prominent figure amongst the SPECTREs, gaining fame for a number of successful investigations where she worked closely with C SEC. She has also become one of the Counsel's experts in first contact, which has been attributed to her past in archeology. As a final note, while she has shifted away from direct combat operations, on several occasions in the past century she has proved that her combat prowess remains intact, including the disastrous second contact with the Yarg, where she and one other commando were responsible for the escape of the ten surviving diplomats following the initial massacre._

_COMBAT EVALUATION: [REDACTED]_

_KNOWN ALIASES: [REDACTED]_

_KNOWN BASES OF OPERATION AND SAFEHOUSES: [REDACTED]_

_KNOWN ASSOCIATES:_

_*DECEASED: G. VAKARIAN [NATURAL CAUSES, 2293]_

_**A. NYXERIS [MIA, PRESUMED DEAD, 2272]_

_**'_ARCHANGEL TEAM_' [UNKNOWN]_

_*ACTIVE: [REDACTED]_

_[END DOSSIER]_

* * *

><p>AN: Next up, the third and final act of Convergence, in which the Master Chief makes his first major appearance, Nieve keeps on fighting the war, Shepard begins to contribute even more and even Liara may have a major impact.

No, I have no idea when the next chapter will come out. I've given up on trying to predict when I'll have writing time.

*Edit* Thanks to Eipok for pointing out that I had a worse than usual number of errors because I rushed this chapter and didn't proofread properly. They've been fixed now.

-PT246


	14. Then and Now

_Chapter 11: Then and Now_

[22:35 Zulu [15:45 Local] Oct 12, 2638 [Military Calendar]/  
>Czerka Forest, Landing County  
>Geart, Epsilon-Phi-03 System]<p>

Nieve's hands shook as he slid more shells into the loading tube, and he fumbled one, dropping it to the ground. He picked it up and when the last shell was in, he racked the slide, prepping the weapon. The shotgun was an old model, a relic of the war, and it had seen use against both the enemies of humanity and Geart's native wildlife in its time. Nieve had only ever used the weapon for hunting, and he'd been surprised by its gory efficiency when he returned it to its original purpose.

Nieve winced as he straightened up and put weight back onto his right leg. He knew that the fresh burn could have been much worse, and that he was lucky that it was only a graze, but he still swore as he began to jog away from the dead pair of jackals, carefully not looking at the spot where his red blood had soaked into the earth along with the alien's purple.

The only warning the colony had had was the bright flashes that glowed like stars in the noon sky. Not long after the first one had appeared the raid sirens mounted throughout Landing City had begun to blare their strident warning, and the superintendant AI had directed people to shelters while the army garrison had begun to set up road blocks.

Nieve and his father had been running errands in the outskirts of the city and when the siren went off, but they'd ignored the instructions and leaped into his car, heading for the small house outside the city that his family called home. For both of them the thought of the rest of their family trying to fight against raiders without them to help was intolerable, and he'd grabbed the old hunting shotgun from the back and started loading it as they sped down the highway.

That attempt had ended when a banshee screamed out of the sky above them two miles from the home, cratering the road in front of them and sending the converted warthog flying, its entire front a glowing mess of melted metal and plastic.

Nieve had thrown himself from the doomed vehicle, gripping the shotgun tightly, knowing the blast had killed his father but still denying it as he sprinted into the cover of the woods, only to run right into the jackal patrol.

The only sound he heard as he left the bodies behind was the crackle of the dead leaves underfoot and the pounding of his heart, forcing blood through adrenalin powered limbs. His vision narrowed into a tunnel, seeing only the clearest path through the tree trunks and tangled underbrush, blocking out everything else.

The massive, hairy arm covered in armor seemed to come out of nowhere as it smashed into him, sending Nieve sprawling onto his back.

The only thing that saved him was his frantic death grip on the shotgun and the panicked state of mind that had left his finger on the trigger, contrary to every rule of gun safety.

A spinal reflex pulled the trigger as he fell, sending hundreds of pellets into the chest of the massive ape-like creature standing over him. The dense spread right out of the muzzle of the weapon was enough to penetrate the Brute's shields, but the thick armor it wore deflected the cluster of shot with ease.

It still surprised the animal and sent it reeling, just long enough for Nieve to stagger upright on his wounded leg and pull the trigger again, and once more, sending two shells straight into the beast's face.

Its savage roar cut off wetly as its head exploded, spattering Nieve with alien blood, and the startled, hissing cries that followed were the only thing that alerted Nieve to its escort of jackals. He scrambled backwards, almost tripping over a root while he fired blindly at them before turning to run again.

As he fled, he heard the light footfalls of the jackals and the heavier thuds of what could only be another Brute behind him above the his pulse in his ears. Suddenly, louder than even that, there was the screaming roar of violated air and a ground shattering impact that left the trees in front of Nieve burning while behind him his pursuers stumbled.

Nieve, in defiance of all logic, kept going towards the flames, hoping that it would discourage the Brute following him, but the massive creature followed him as he plunged towards the black object in the center of the crater.

"Down!" It was the first human voice Nieve had heard since he'd been forced into the woods and he dropped instantly in response. As he did so the Brute behind him roared and charged forward, thundering past Nieve towards the newcomer.

The only reply the Brute got was the rapid coughing of a battle rifle burst firing as fast as the wielder could pull the trigger. Nieve looked up from the leaves at the sound, just in time to see the Brute crash into an armored figure, hacking at it with the blade attached to its weapon and sending the soldier flying.

Nieve worked the shotgun free from under him and drew a bead on the Brute's back as it closed in on the fallen figure. It' familiar pounded at his ears, and he kept firing at the distracted Brute until the weapon clicked empty.

By then the Brute had turned around again, and Nieve knew he was dead when the barrel of the spiker rose until it was pointed directly at him. The alien grinned savagely at him for a moment, before its face exploded outward and the retort from a pistol shook the forest.

It took Nieve a stunned moment to realize he was still alive as the Brute collapsed bonelessly to the ground, and longer still to pick himself up and start moving again. The jackals behind him had fled when the Brute died, leaving him alive to search for easier prey.

He fumbled at his pockets again, finding more of the handful of shells he'd had a chance to grab earlier and he started to slide them into the shotgun that had saved him three times already.

"Kid, over here," The same voice spoke again, and he realized he'd forgotten the helljumper—now that he'd had a second to breath, he recognized the HEV pod in the center of the clearing it had made—and he turned and limped towards where the soldier had fallen.

The ODST's armor had been sliced open by the blade on the spiker, and dark red blood seeped sluggishly from the gash across his stomach. The man guestured to the cut as Nieve approached. "It's not as bad as it looks, but I can't take care of it myself. There's biofoam in the side pouch of my ruck, dig it out, will ya?"

It took Nieve less than a minute to find the biofoam canister from the first aid kit, and he carefully sprayed it into the man's wound, trying to ignore the blood splashed across the armor.

"Thanks, kid." Nieve simply nodded, unable to articulate a reply as the events of the day began to catch up with him. Instead, he reached out and caught the man's wrist, helping him to his feet.

The ODST stumbled towards his pod and the battle rifle he'd dropped beside it, talking to Nieve all the way, trying to keep him calm.

"It's just luck that we happened to be here. _Artemis Rising_—my ship—had only recently come in system as part of a patrol, and we were on our way out when we spotted the Brute cruisers." He bent down and collected the rifle before rummaging in the pod for supplies. "By the time we got back most of the local defense was down, but your people put up a hell of a flight. _Arty_'s still fighting, but her first run past the planet put my entire company in the air, and more marines following in pelicans, so we'll get this problem taken care of quick.

"I'd be with everyone else, but they saw us coming and one of those fucking anti-air phantoms threw a blast right in the middle of the formation. It's just luck that I ended up down here, and even luckier that I'm still—Kid, are you alright?"

Nieve had staggered over to a tree and emptied the contents of his stomach in a series of convulsive heaves that continued even when there was nothing left. He felt a hand on his shoulder, guiding him down until he was sitting against one of the trees, while another hand gently removed the shotgun he was still holding.

"Easy, kid. The worst is over now. Just take it easy for a moment." The ODST knelt by Nieve's side, and he took his helmet off, letting Nieve see his face for the first time.

His craggy face was marred by a series of scars down one side that went from his graying blond hair down past his eye, ending by his mouth, pulling it into an ever so slightly lopsided smile. Nieve focused on the details of his face, trying not to think about anything else.

"You did good, kid. There aren't too many your age who could take on Brutes and jackals and come out alive." The man did his best to keep Nieve's attention as he carefully probed the burn on his thigh. He unsheathed his knife and used it to cut away the fabric of Nieve's pants, speaking the whole time.

Nieve felt a grey haze decend over his vision as the helljumper pulled something from his medkid and sprayed it on the burn. The pain he'd been feeling receded towards a comfortable blackness, and he relaxed for a second, falling into it's embrace.

He woke seconds later as the man lightly slapped his face. "Stay with me kid. I may not be able to help with the rest of the fight, but I'm damn well keeping you alive."

Nieve shook himself, then reached out with one hand to grab the discarded shotgun. For the third time that day he mechanically pulled shells from his pocket and slid them into his weapon, finishing his interrupted reload. This time his hands were completely still as he did so and when the last shell slid into place he looked back up at the soldier.

"That's more like it. It fucking sucks sometimes, kid, but you get more done if you just accept it and move on. Keep something in mind, some goal to keep you from thinking about it all."

Nieve drew a deep breath and used the tree to pull himself upright, as steady on his feet as his hands had been on the shotgun.

"My house," he said, shocked at how even his voice was. "I need to get to my house. My sister—Oh God, my sister!" Nieve set out at a dead run, heading further into the forest, making a beeline for his home on sheer instinct. He didn't notice the soldier following behind him any more than he paid attention to the light impacts on his side.

* * *

><p>[12:15 Zulu [09:53 Local], Feb 29, 2652 [Military Calendar]  
>Grid 19924601, Western Landmass  
>Sabinan, C-Z-0049 System]<p>

Nieve was on his feet with his knife in hand before it fully registered that the foot nudging him the ribs was just trying to wake him. Relaxing, he slid the knife back into the sheath on his chest plate and took in his surroundings, before reaching down and grabbing his rifle.

"The fuck do you want, Hayes?" He asked as he checked the weapon's magazine.

"Command's on the horn, Sarge." Hayes responded, ignoring Nieve's annoyance at being woken up. "They want an update on our progress, and I think they have more intel for us."

"Of course they have more intel," Nieve grumbled, "They always have more intel, because they're the only fucking ones who can talk to anyone else in this shit show. Have you had any luck raising Green Team?"

"Nope. My best guess is that their radio took damage, and they can't use anything but the burst transmitter to orbit and the local stuff. They might be able to receive, but the only way they can get anything to us is to relay it through _Leviathan's Wrath_."

"Damn. Alright, I'm patching in to your set. Go wake Cong and Arany up." Nieve paused for a moment as his helmet radio connected with the far more powerful unit in Hayes' pack. "Claymore, this is Oscar One-Six. How copy, over?"

The ONI officer who'd ordered the mission responded from the cruiser Nieve and his three men had dropped from almost immediately. "There's some interference on the channel, One-Six, but I read you. What's your situation, over?"

"Hasn't changed much, Claymore," Nieve replied. "We're at grid one-niner-niner-two-four-six-zero-one, twenty klicks from the target area. Have you been able to drop more support?"

"Negative, One-Six. The AA that blew you off course is still blanketing the area. We tried a second drop, but there were no survivors. We're tasking Sierra One-One-Seven and his unit to provide additional support, but they're tied up in the fighting on the eastern continent," Nieve winced at that. The Turians had almost a million men garrisoning the planet, and a disproportionate number of them had been on the eastern continent six months ago when the UNSC first descended on the planet. Claymore continued, "and we estimate eighteen, say again one-eight, hours before we can get them to the AO, and another four hours for ground insertion. You're on your own to then."

"Fuck," Nieve swore, encapsulating his feelings, though he made sure his mike was turned off first. "Claymore, do you have any further intel on Green Team's situation, over?"

"Latest reports put them at one WIA, three MIA, and a one unaccounted for, possibly a prisoner." Claymore said, his voice flat.

For Nieve, that was very bad news. If the man in charge of the Spartans' operations was differentiating between missing in action and unaccounted for, than the two missing Spartans were almost certainly dead. That left him with the compelling question of what exactly it was that could kill two, wound another two badly enough that they weren't able to extract themselves, and strangest of all, capture one.

"Shit, Claymore, that's not good. Three Spartans MIA? What the hell are we walking into, sir?"

"If I knew, Sergeant, I'd tell you. The only reason we haven't flattened the target from up here is that I want to know as much as you do, and my CO's even more curious than we are."

"Roger that, Claymore. We'll contact you when we reach the target or in three hours, whichever comes first. Oscar One-Six out."

Nieve turned to face the rest of his team, and looked at the two that Hayes had just woken up. "You get that, Cong, Arany?" When they both nodded he spoke again. "Alright, then. We have to go twenty klicks through this mess," his out swept arm took in the dense, alien woods, "and we have to do it fast, so let's get moving."

* * *

><p>[00:59 Zulu [22:37 Local], March 1, 2652 [Military Calendar]  
>Grid 07872995, Western Landmass  
>Sabinan, System C-Z-0049]<p>

There was a reason Nieve, had never specialized in sniping despite being an excellent shot. He absolutely hated missions that required staying put for hours on end. He'd been lying prone in the underbrush at the outskirts of the Turian camp for the better part of five hours while he waited for the light to dim enough to make sneaking in feasible.

He shifted, beginning to move through the brush, and then froze again, the camouflage pattern painted on his armor blending seamlessly with his surroundings. A Turian patrol moved past him, checking the perimeter beyond the sentries they'd posted.

They scanned the woods around them, but as attentive as they were to their security, they were completely oblivious to what the dappled moonlight and dense forest hid from them. Nieve was confident they'd miss him even if they had infrared or night vision in their helmets—one of the major updates made to ODST armor five years before the Second Contact War had begun gave it a completely neutral thermal signature that automatically adjusted to the environment it was in, and humans had been spoofing night vision equipment for centuries with properly designed disruptive camo patterns.

Nieve waited for them to disappear back into the woods before he began to crawl forward again, inching closer to the position he'd designated as the rally point for team. Ordinarily, he would have worried about the motion sensors the Birds had begun to deploy around their campsites early in the second year of the war, but the forest was far to alive for them to be effective. The Turians would have found their sensor plot filled with alerts made by wildlife, effectively making the sensors useless.

Instead, they'd chosen to rely upon the oldest method of security, using sentries and random patrols to keep intruders out. Unfortunately for them, that hadn't been enough to stop the helljumpers, who'd slowly slipped into hiding spots during the day, and now left them even more slowly, dodging or hiding from the patrols with contemptuous ease while the stayed out of the sentries' sight.

Nieve reached the rally point second after Arany, who was prone behind a mound when he arrived, looking at the Turian camp through the scope of her sniper rifle. He didn't say a word as he eased himself into position beside her and activated his helmet's built in zoom function. It didn't enhance his view to the same magnitude the high power scope on the rifle would have, but it was more than enough for him to make out the camouflaged buildings of the compound.

In his opinion, a disturbingly high number of those buildings were defensive emplacements of some sort. All around the perimeter were auto-retracting turrets that would deploy against any significant ground threat. Worse, studded throughout the compound were the unmistakable forms of Turian anti-air emplacements. They were a mixture of heavy lasers for close in work against heavy air units and large mass accelerator cannons like the one's whose blasts had been responsible for killing the second team in his drop, blowing his own unit well off course, and completely destroying the second wave of drops.

Cong and Hayes had reached the rally point while he was taking in the defense system, and the hard-bitten corporal who'd replaced Jones seven months previously offered his own opinion. "Sarge, that's going to be a cast iron bitch to get into. It'd have been a massacre if we'd actually landed on target, and now we have to figure out a way to get past all of that crap. Any ideas?"

Nieve smiled to himself as he responded, though he was careful to keep it out of his voice. "Well, I do have the first step of a plan. To start with, how're you holding up, LT?"

"Still alive, Staff Sergeant." A new voice cut into the radio circuit as the mound Arany had been resting her rifle on stirred, taking on the unmistakable form of a Spartan in MLONJIR armor beneath the ghuille suit that had helped it blend so seamlessly into the surroundings.

"Shit! Sorry, ma'am, I didn't realize you were there." Arany apologized.

"That's the idea." The Spartan replied, shrugging it off.

Nieve frowned when he realized that the echo he'd been hearing as the she spoke wasn't just a radio malfunction. Her voice was also reaching the audio sensors on his helmet. When she turned around to look at them, he felt his stomach drop.

MLONJIR armor was always the latest and greatest in the field of man-portable powered armor, designed to be worn by Spartans who could bear it's immense weight without noticing and use it to the full extend of it's capabilities. He knew that, just like everyone in the UNSC who paid any attention to military technology.

That made the damage the Lieutenant's armor had suffered all the more terrifying. The super dense plating was warped and twisted in mind bending patterns, pulled loose from the armor's under layer and left sticking out in random, jagged pieces. Her helmet had taken similar damage, though less of it. The shape was distorted around the edges, but it seemed to be fundamentally intact except for the visor, which had been shattered and broken in half.

Her face was almost as beaten as her armor. It was covered in blood from the scabbed over cuts left by shattered fragments of the visor to the point where almost none of her pale skin was visible. One of the cuts had only just missed her eye, there were several large abrasions across her cheek and mud had mixed in with the blood liberally, creating a nightmarish visage.

To cap it all off, as she crawled to them, she was clearly favoring her right side, and her right leg dragged behind her, almost completely limp.

"Fuck!" Hayes's whispered curse summed up Nieve's feelings on the situation quite well, and the Spartan graced the radioman with a grim smile as he continued. "Ma'am, how the hell did your radio even work after the beating you're armor's taken?"

She grimaced as she replied, "Luck." Nieve could tell she hated the answer almost as much as he would have in her place.

Nieve decided it was time to cut in before the conversation got out of had. "What the hell happened to you, LT?" he said, turning to face her full on.

She sighed, something Nieve had never expected to see a Spartan do, before replying. "The birds hit us with something unexpected. Have you seen the ONI briefs on what they're calling 'biotics', Nieve?"

"Yeah. I even ran into one once, on Trayus. We captured her,

"In that case we've met before, Nieve. I was part of the convoy that got you out. I'm Shepard, if that rings a bell." Nieve was caught up in the revelation that Shepards' IFF transponder had been turned off or damaged and hadn't transmitted her name or at least her call sign to him, and almost missed the brief, friendly smile she gave him.

"ONI didn't think the Birds had biotics in any numbers, so we were only given cursory brief on the what they could do. We weren't ready for it when a full unit of biotics ambushed us.

"Two of my team went down in the first minute of the fight, a third was wounded, and one kept giving them hell for nearly an hour. I was pulling overwatch, but I couldn't help them because I ended up having my own biotic to deal with."

Nieve shook his head. That was the worst he'd ever heard of happening to a Spartan unit is the Fall of Reach, and as an ODST he heard every negative story about Spartans in circulation. "Well," he said, "At least we know what we're dealing with now." An ambush by biotics was about the most deviating think he could think of, if some of ONI's speculation was correct, and he could see how even a unit of Spartans would be hit hard by one. "Shepard, can you tell me which buildings are which in the camp?" He asked, "And Hayes, get me Claymore. There're a couple of things I want to talk over with him."

* * *

><p>AN: Well, Act III has well and truly begun, and beginning with it is my new goal: to have the remaining chapters (4 if everything goes to plan, but possibly more) and the epilogue posted by the end of the year, even if it means the last update happens at 23:59:59 on Dec 31st.

For all of you who were wondering if we were ever going to see Turian biotic cabals, the answer is yes. And if you happen to be wondering how a bunch of biotics can defeat a Spartan team, just remember that it's hard to fight when you find yourself suddenly floating in midair as a giant target.

Alternatively, it happened because the plot demanded that it happen, but I do generally at least try to justify these things.

Finally, fun facst: This chapter has actually had the most editing work of any that I've published so far. Shepard started out as a rather verbose character, and I found myself needing to go in and cut down what she said. It's not that she's not talkative per say, but this just isn't the time and place for her to be talkative.

I also used grid coordinates as the location reference for the first time because there isn't anything else to use—Nieve and co are in the middle of nowhere, headed towards a camp that's also in the middle of nowhere, with no major landmarks to use as a point of reference. It is about 8 kilometers (that's the 0787 bit) from the edge of the map, which just happens to be the sea, but that's it.

No, I have no idea what those grids correspond to in real life. Amongst other things, it depends on the map.

-PT246


	15. Shadow and Fire

_Chapter 12: Shadow and Fire_

[01:38 Zulu [23:09 Local], March 1, 2652 [Military Calendar]/  
>Grid 07823004, Western Landmass  
>Sabinan, System C-Z-0049]<p>

Nieve waited until the turian was completely around the corner before striking. He rose up silently behind the alien and stalked after it, knife in hand. The moment he was in reach, his left arm flashed out, wrapping around the Turian's head and covering its mouth, while his left hand plunged the knife deep into its throat.

The quiet screech the knife made as is slid through the hardened plates of the Turian's hide was noticeable, but not enough to be heard above the ambient sounds of a forest at night, and it lasted for less than a second. At the end of that second, the knife was seated deeply in the alien's throat, and Nieve ripped it viciously forward, tearing it out in a spray of blood that left the Turian half decapitated as is Nieve lowered to corpse slowly to the ground.

Hayes appeared out of the darkness and wordlessly joined him as he moved the body to the very base of the barracks wall, where it would hopefully go unnoticed.

"He's down," Nieve said, but he wasn't talking to Hayes.

"Good. You're clear for the next five mikes, so get that beacon placed," Shepard responded from her position overlooking the camp. Arany hadn't been happy to trading her sniper rifle for Shepard's DMR, but there was no was no denying that the Spartan was only good for ranged support at the moment. Since bullets hadn't started flying yet, Shepard was using her vantage point to direct the ODSTs and keep them out of trouble.

The barracks was a low structure, only a little taller than Nieve himself, but it continued underground, dug in to help conceal and protect it. Nieve doubted that it had been designed with what he was about to do in mind, though.

He and Hayes both scrambled on the building's roof, and wormed their way to the center, staying as flat and unobtrusive as they could. When they reached the center, Hayes placed a box about the size of his hand on in, and depressed the button's on the box's surface in a practiced combination.

There was no visible reaction from the device, but it was suddenly outlined in red on both the helljumper's HUDs, and they both began to slowly work their way back from the now active box.

"It's placed." Nieve said. "Cong, Arany, how are you doing?"

"We've tagged the communications relay, Sarge, and we're heading to the RV now. We'll be there inside ten mikes." Cong replied.

"Good. We'll meet you there. How's it look, Shepard?"

"That next patrol is about two mikes away. After that you've got one other patrol between you and the RV." The Spartan said.

Nieve didn't bother replying. He and Hayes were already face down in the grass, crawling forward on their stomachs. The visible buildings in the camp were separated by stretches of cleared ground ten meters wide, and they needed to get across the stretch they were in before the patrol reached them, or they would be caught out in the open, clearly visible to the Turians.

They made it to the next building and around the corner with thirty seconds to spare, and Nieve paused for a moment, checking that his knife was still secure in it's sheath before carrying on.

The two ODSTs continued to wriggle forward through the grass at the edge of the building, staying pressed against the earth. The slid through the darkest patches they could find, using every trick they knew to stay unobserved, before meeting up with Arany and Cong just inside the edge of the forest.

Like Nieve and Hayes, the other helljumpers were covered in mud and eater form the damp grass and the churned up earth of the heavily patrolled section of the camp. Arany was also liberally spattered with blood, a testament to her vicious knife work when dealing with inconvenient sentries, and Cong's forearms had been splashed with thick blue blood that was so dark it was almost black in the moonlight.

"We're set, Shepard," Nieve radioed.

"Roger. Tell Claymore to initiate."

Nieve gestured to Hayes, who transmitted a short message to their contact in orbit. When Hayes nodded back at him, he spoke to Shepard again. "Claymore will be in position in thirty, Shepard. Weapons hot on your mark."

The forest seemed unnaturally still for the next thirty seconds. Intellectually, Nieve knew that the Turians and the wildlife were blissfully unaware of what was about to happen, but the tension slowed those thirty seconds to an eternity.

The moment was shattered as a bright blue beam pierced the heavens, stabbing downwards towards the Turian camp. The impact of the AI controlled column of plasma originating from Sanghellie frigate in low orbit was devastating, and it struck exactly where it was intended to.

The small box that Cong and Arany had placed on the top of the Turian's communication center vanished in the first instant of the attack, turned into an incandescent sphere of fire, vaporized plastic and molten metal. The beam began to widen, engulfing the whole building in less than a second, leaving behind a ten meter deep crater of scorched earth, the middle of which was already filled with a pool of molten rock that would slowly dry into obsidian—the dreaded glass left behind by any major plasma strike against surface targets.

The forty Turians of the night communications watch died instantaneously, but they did not die alone. A second beam struck before the first had even finished its deadly work. Its target was the beacon Nieve had placed on top of the barracks, and it was an even more devastating strike than the first.

The barracks had the single largest above ground structure in the camp, and only the headquarters building had a more extensive subterranean complex. Only the most extensive, dug in reaches of the barracks complex were spared from sudden incineration, but the deaths of the Turians in those rooms was equally horrifying.

Superheated gasses and droplets of liquid metal blasted outward from the crater, engulfing the survivors, burning them where they stood. The lucky ones died instantly, while the unlucky ones were left with limbs seared to the bone, or simply gone, leaving nothing but cauterized stumps and massive oozing wounds from where their skin had literally been stripped away.

"Weapons hot!" Shepard announced over the radio. "Go, go, go!" She matched her words with actions, and her borrowed sniper rifle spoke, it's thunderous voice lost in the symphony of destruction.

Nieve and his squad advanced unhesitatingly into the hell on earth they'd helped unleash. Flames licked at the grass around them, threatening to spread into the trees, but they ignored it as they plunged forward towards the Turian headquarters, the only building left untouched by the cataclysm that had struck the camp.

As they ran towards the building, Nieve slowed for an instant, and fired a twice with his rifle. His target was writhing in pain, it's legs utterly mangled by the fringes of the blast, but both his bullets struck squarely in it's chest, abruptly cutting off one of the many screams of agony that filled the air in the camp, as the roaring flames reached out to enclose the new body.

He reached the back wall of the headquarters a single step behind the rest of the squad, but none of them commented on his minor act of mercy. At least one of them had undoubtedly done the same, since Nieve had heard the familiar voices of human weapons as they ran.

Wordlessly the squad arrayed itself into two teams, one on either side of a patch of the wall that looked no different from the others. Nieve pulled a plasma grenade from one of the equipment pouches on his armor, while Cong, directly opposite him, drew out a more conventional fragmentation grenade.

"Three…" Nieve said, and the rest of the squad tensed ever so slightly, knowing what was coming, "Two… One." Arany triggered the shaped charge she'd planted earlier, and the wall section disappeared in a deafening explosion. Slivers of metal from the wall flew inwards, eviscerating a Turian who'd been standing just inside the building from them.

Nieve and Cong followed their deadly entrance with their grenades. The harsh light of the plasma grenade stunned those who were beyond its blast radius, while those caught within its range simply ceased to exist as it burned through their shields and armor. Cong's grenade was hard on the heels of Nieves, sending a storm of shrapnel hissing through the room, punching though equipment that had been slagged by the heat of the first grenade and shredding the unlucky few who had been left alive by the first two detonations.

The four ODSTs burst into the room, their weapons sweeping out to cover every possible approach. "Clear," Nieve called, looking at the blacked remains and blood spattered walls dispassionately. "We're in, Shepard."

"Understood. I'll keep picking of survivors from here." The Spartan replied.

"Roger that, LT." Nieve replied while he nudged a corpse out of his way with his boot. "We're proceeding deeper into the building."

Nieve turned and gestured for his squad to start moving again when a round hissed past his head. He reacted without thinking, throwing himself down behind one of the wrecked consoles of the room they'd breached.

He heard Hayes shooting back as he slammed his back against the consol, ducking beneath the stream of fire passing overhead. When he cautiously looked around the edge of his cover, he was forced to withdraw his head quickly as several rounds slammed into the corner inches from his face, and one impacted on his shields.

"Fire in the hole!" Arany called, and seconds later the doorway the Turians had been shooting from vanished in a hail of fragments that left the floor scorched black while perforated Turians slowly leaked blue blood onto it.

"All Birds are down, Sarge," Arany reported a second later.

Nieve stood up and took in his surrounding properly for the first time. The room they'd breached wasn't particularly large, though it had probably felt more claustrophobic when the corpses on the floor had been moving through it.

The consol he'd thrown himself behind had occupied the center of the room, and floating above it was a flickering hologram of the camp. Large sections of the map, including the communications relay, barracks, and a number of the defensive emplacements had been overlaid with a bright blue filter that covered both the buildings and the ground between them that had been completely destroyed by the plasma strikes.

"Damn, we do good work," Cong said as he looked at the map.

"Yeah, but we're not finished yet." Nieve replied, "So let's move."

The squad passed through the doorway they'd been shooting at only moments before, pausing briefly to double check that all of the Turians were dead. The door opened onto a stairway down into the underground section of the bunker.

Nieve led them down the stairs slowly, checking the corner formed by the landing to make sure it was clear before moving down the second flight to the door below. The camp's power generator was intact, and a bright red holographic lock glowed in the center of the thick steel door.

None of Nieve's squad members had any hacking experience or an AI to assist them in dealing with enemy systems, so he opted for a far simpler method of entry. Given that they were making a four man assault on a Turian base with orbital fire support, stealth was not an issues, so he removed a breaching charge from his pack and placed it in the center of the door.

Had they not been wearing helmets the concussive blast from the charge would have torn the eardrums of all four of the ODSTs as it echoed through the narrow stairwell. While the sound of the blast was still ringing through the air, Nieve tossed a grenade through the breach. After the grenade detonated Nieve burst through the gap in the middle of the crumpled doors, rifle raised, and the rest of his squad followed right behind him.

The walls of the corridor were pockmarked with shrapnel scars, and there was a burnt patch in the center of the floor where the grenade had blown up, but there were no Turians, dead or alive, in sight.

"Split up, check the rooms on either side." Nieve ordered. He and Cong moved into the first room on the right, only to find it utterly deserted. It was a small office, but nothing remained besides the desk. The room was barren except for a few loose cables that ran up onto the desk, where a terminal had been not long before.

"Clear," Hayes said from across the hall. "It looks like they took anything important and left in a hurry."

"Same here," Nieve replied. "Something's off about this. Keep your eyes open."

The rest of the hallway was exactly the same-small rooms, mostly offices, which had been stripped of anything useful. The squad progressed down towards the end of the section, checking each and every room to make sure that no Turians were hiding in them.

Nieve knew that something was wrong. He wasn't able to quantify it, and he could think of several logical explanations for why the section of hallway was abandoned even as he cleared out more rooms. Nonetheless, something about the utter lack of resistance unnerved him and his instincts screamed that even if the Turians had withdrawn deeper into the complex, they should have encountered at least some resistance.

The next hallway was the same, and so was the hall after that. Nieve could feel the earth rumbling as suppression strikes following the initial bombardment, but otherwise he could have been in an abandoned structure, far removed from any battlefield.

The first warning they had that they'd reached the section the Turians planned on holding against them was when the grenade Nieve through the door they were breaching at the end of the third hallway was incased in a blue field and flew back towards them.

It one of the flashbang's they'd brought. Nieve had considered them just another part of his kit that he took incase he needed it, but he hadn't expected to use any. Than he'd found himself clearing empty rooms and he'd started using them to save his supply of more destructive grenades.

That was all that saved the squad. Their visors automatically polarized and cut off external audio feed whenever one of their flashbangs detonated, so it didn't affect them at all.

The slug of blue energy that followed out of the breach and slammed into Arany was a different matter. She was thrown back down the corridor at an angle and slammed into one of the walls, dropping heavily to the ground in a clatter of armor and dropped weapons.

"Fuck!" Nieve was still standing against the wall beside the door when the biotic attack passed through it. It went by without harming either him or Hayes, who was on the opposite side of the door.

They responded by leaning out and firing, laying down a barrage of bullets long enough for Cong to find cover in another doorway.

The moment he saw that Cong was clear, Nieve stopped firing and grabbed a frag grenade from his equipment pouches. He rolled it through the doorway rather than lobbing it while the other two fired over his head, distracting the Turians from the small object at their feet.

It blew up, and he rushed through the door, shooting at any Turians he could see with Hayes right behind him. The deep voices of gunpowder weapons were joined by the light cracks of mass effect weapons, rounds hissing through the air.

Several attacks sparked off of Nieve's shield as he dove to the ground at the base of the barricade the Turians had set up on the far side of the door. The grenade and the storm of depleted uranium slugs that followed it had been enough to drive the Turians back to the next set of barricades, and fire was already coming their way from them.

"Cong, how's Arany?" Nieve asked as he slammed a fresh magazine into his rifle.

"A couple of cracked ribs, Sarge, nothing fatal," Arany replied herself. She and Cong sprinted through the doorway while Nieve and Hayes covered them. This time they shot at any Turian who was visible, forcing their heads down while conserving ammo.

Nieve had just ducked behind a crate in the barricade when a blue light surrounded it. Not knowing what was going on, he threw himself backwards and went prone, sighting down his rifle at the crate.

At almost exactly the same time the crate flew up into the air, passing over his head and slamming into the wall behind him. A concentrated barrage of fire from Turian weapons struck where he had been moments ago, and several stray rounds cracked off his already dangerously low shields.

"Fuck! Somebody kill those bastards, now!" Nieve shouted while he rolled sideways, moving out of sight of the gap.

"How? These fuckers have more than one trick, Sarge." Cong asked. Nieve stuck his head out cautiously and saw that there was now a shimmering blue barrier cutting off the whole hallway in front of the Turian barricade.

"They can't keep this up forever—it's how I got away in the first place." Shepard cut in over the radio. "Try a whole bunch of grenades, you might be able to overwhelm whatever defenses they have."

"Right. Anybody got a better idea than the LT?" Nobody replied to Nieve. "Grenades it is. Use frags to crack that barrier, then hit the fuckers with plasma—I don't think they can stop the heat."

The hallway seemed oddly silent when the ODSTs stopped firing. The lighter cracks of Turian weapons didn't echo through the air in the same way leaving the area strangely empty sounding for a moment.

That silence was broken all at once as four grenades struck the floor just in front of the shield. The helljumpers lay low behind the wall of crates as the grenades detonated, sending a hailstorm of fragments ricocheting through the hall. The near simultaneous detonations proved to be too much for the Turian sustaining the barrier to handle, and it collapsed just in time for a set of four incandescent blue spheres to fly over the barricade and into the faces of the biotics.

The wash of heat from the blast was enough to short out the shields of all four members of Nieve's team and their armor began to heat up uncomfortably despite the two barricades, fifteen feet of hall between them and the impact point.

They rose up from behind their barricade to see that the rest of the hallway had been turned into a nightmare of half melted metal and plastics. The wall of crates the Turians had been hiding behind was a crazed jumble of twisted shapes fused together in a single instant, scorched completely black.

Nieve lead his squad slowly down the corridor, searching for any sign of movement. When they reached the barricade, he and Arany pulled away one of the mangled crates, revealing what was on the far side.

A pair of charred corpses greeted them. A pool of metal and ceramics that had once been their armor surrounded each, but it had proven woefully ineffective. The outer plates that made up their skin had been burnt to a crisp, and when Nieve nudged one with his boot the plating crumbled to ashes, revealing flesh the consistency of charcoal.

"Holy fuck." Cong breathed. "Just two of them? Two birds with biotics were able to keep us pinned down?"

"Yeah, that's not good." Hayes agreed. "This just keeps getting worse, doesn't it?"

"Quiet, both of you," Nieve ordered as he kept walking. "How're we doing on grenades, people?"

The answer was disheartening. Every one of them was down to their last actual grenade, either frag or plasma, though they had some remaining flashbangs.

"Fuck. Well, save what you have incase we run into more biotics." With that he kept going further into the complex.

They continued through another deserted hallway, only stopping when they reached a side passage that led to a reinforced doorway. "I'd say this is it. Cong, blow it."

Cong unslung his pack and pulled a breaching charge from one of it's many pockets. He slapped it onto the door and then waved the whole team back.

They retreated around the corner too keep clear of the detonation in the confined space. Once again, Nieve pulled out a flashbang grenade, while Hayes readied a frag just incase.

Nieve nodded to Cong, and the other ODST pressed the detonator, setting off the charge. Nieve tossed his flashbang around the corner right away, and the moment the hallway lit up with an intense flash of light he sprinted around the corner, his rifle at the ready and his squad behind him.

There was a pair of stunned Turians in the room who were groping for their weapons. They'd both been wearing armor, but their helmets were off, giving them no protection from the flashbang.

Nieve placed a pair of rounds straight between the eyes of the first Turian, while Arany did the same for the second.

"Clear." Nieve said, and turned to look at the room's third occupant. He was a massive man, even without the bulky MLONJIR armor that had been stacked off to one side. He was wounded in several places, including a massive bruise spreading across his entire chest from some immense impact, and a leg that had been either blown off or cut of after his capture.

"Huh. I was expecting more Spartans, not a bunch of helljumpers." He said, sitting up.

"Yeah, well, they were busy. The Chief's on his way, but he was delayed but having to get out of some nasty fight elsewhere first. In the meantime, they sent us." Hayes said.

"Good enough for me," The Spartan replied, checking the field dressing on the stump of his leg. "Give me a hand here, will you?"

* * *

><p>AN: Not too much to say here. Exactly how the turians managed to hold a Spartan prisoner will be addressed in the next chapter, for those who are wondering.

That being said, assuming I'm able to follow the plan I wrote up a while back, there's only three chapters and an epilogue left in Convergence.

-PT246


	16. Conversations

_Chapter 13: Conversations_

[10:37 Zulu [08:08 Local], March 1, 2652 [Military Calendar]/  
>Grid 07902989, Western Landmass  
>Sabinan, System C-Z-0049]<p>

The noise was what woke Nieve. Hayes and Arany were pulling security while the rest of the team and both of the wounded Spartans slept. He should have been asleep too, but the sounds of a large group of people moving through the smoldering wasteland that had been vibrant forest lest than a day previously was enough to disturb his brief, already troubled sleep.

The sun had risen just enough for light to stream into the foxhole he was curled up in, passing through the gaps in the now blackened camouflage netting he'd strung over the opening. The light revealed a figure whose dark green and brown armor had been streaked with grey ash and black charcoal, then covered in dirt by the excavation of his fighting position.

Nieve's armor was a fitting match for the burnt out leavings of the firestorm that had swept through the forest the night before, ignited by the white-hot heat of plasma strikes. The hole he was sharing with Shepard and the other injured Spartan had been dug quickly and deeply, in an attempt to avoid the fires. Between getting beneath the superheated air and the environmental systems of his armor, Nieve had ridden out the flames comfortably, watching in awe at the hellish deviation he'd helped unleash on the unsuspecting world.

Shepard and her other companion hadn't said a word, but he'd seen the burns on their exposed skin, where their armor was breached or simply gone, in the case of the still unconscious survivor. They had not had as easy a night as he had, and he was careful not to disturb either of them as he slowly climbed to his feet, peering out above the rim of the foxhole, his rifle in hand.

Hayes' head and weapon were sticking out of the ground a few yards to his left and Arany was in a similar position away on his right, both of them keeping watch on the world around them while everyone else slept.

"Anything going on?" Nieve asked, "And what was that noise?"

"Turian patrol, Sarge," Hayes answered. "Moving away at your three. Doesn't look like they spotted us."

"They looked like shit, too." Arany added. "Survivors, probably, looking for more of their own. We did a real number on them."

"Ok. What about the fire?"

"There are still pocket of embers around here—just look for the smoke patches and you'll spot them. The wind picked up a while back and started pushing the flames off east. Not our problem anymore, Sarge."

"Blue Team?"

"They're close." Hayes replied. "Claymore's been keeping us updated on their progress. They're making better time than we expected but they kept running into AA emplacements. They've slowed down a little and they're marking them for our air support to hit. It should give the pelicans a straight shot in from the coast one they take them out. ETA is about thirty mikes."

"Damn. All that since I went to sleep?"

"Yeah. Things have moved fast since Blue Team hit dirt about an hour and a half ago. The Spartans are really booking it, even through this jungle." Hayes' lazy hand wave took in their blackened surroundings and the edge of the tree line just visible to the east.

Nieve stayed upright for a few moments longer, turning around to take in all of his surroundings, before he bent down and touched Shepard lightly on the shoulder. It was enough to wake her, and her battered helmet turned towards him, her single visible eye looking balefully out at him from the patchwork of scabs, dried blood, and dirt around it, while the other eye remained covered by the remains of her emotionless visor. "Thirty mikes until Blue Team arrives, LT." Nieve said, by way of explanation for waking her.

"Right, Sarge, get everyone else awake and stand to." Shepard replied, sounding perfectly awake.

"Roger that, LT." Nieve slipped out of the hole as Shepard moved to wake her injured comrade. He crawled through the ash towards Arany's position; thankful that his visor kept the dust he was kicking up from getting into his eyes.

We he got to her hole he rolled into it, landing with a thump next to Cong, who he shook awake. "Relief's almost here. Get up, stand to." With that he clambered back out and made his way back to Shepard.

"Everyone's up, LT. How's Green Three?"

"He'll live, Sarge."

"Right." Nieve got back in the hole and looked back out over the wasteland, while Shepard covered the other side. Fifteen minutes passed without any sign of movement, then Cong radioed, "Birds coming up on the west side. Platoon strength and armor."

"Fuck." Nieve swore quietly. "We're done for if they find us, ma'am. We didn't bring anti-armor weapons."

"Relax," Shepard said, her voice completely calm. "Fifteen mikes until support arrives. Nobody shoots without my say so."

The squad fell silent, double checking their weapons and tracking the Turians in complete silence. The only sounds they could hear were the distant roar of the fire and the closer rumble of armor grinding its way through the ash.

The silence was broken by a radio transmission after another tense fifteen minutes of watching the Turians search for them. "Oscar One-Six, this is Blue One, how copy, over?"

"Loud and clear, Chief." Nieve replied. "Green Two is operational and has command, over."

"Roger that. Green Two, we're in the tree line. I make 37 hostile dismounts and one tank between our positions. We can't go around."

"We see them, Blue One." Shepard said. "That's an affirmative—there's no way around them. Do you have anti-armor?"

"We do, Green Two."

"Right. We'll attack on my signal and draw their fire. You hit the tank and take them from behind, Chief."

"Ready on your mark, Green Two."

Nieve watched as Shepard turned and nodded at him. "Now," he said, ad followed his own orders, opening up on the Turians. They were to far away to do much damage, but the Turians dropped to the ground and began to search for the source of the incoming fire. Shepard's sniper rifle sounded four times in quick succession, and four of the Turians went limp.

"Mark." Shepard said, and the Turian tank exploded in a ball of fire. The first shot burned through the shields and the second rocket streaked in, blowing the machine into pieces. Nieve and his squad instantly stopped shooting as figures began to rush in from the other side, closing with the Turians while they were looking the other direction.

Shepard continued to fire, smoothly burning through a clip and reloading as Turians died more than a kilometer away.

It was over in less than five minutes. The Spartan team's attack was carried out with brutal efficiency, leaving no survivors. Blue team then sprinted across the open ground to Nieves' position, forming a perimeter around it while the Master Chief walked over to Shepard.

"We marked every one of the AA positions between here and the coast, Ma'am. The pelicans are on standby to extract us, and Claymore will clear the path on our signal." He said.

"Go ahead, Chief. Let's get out of here." Shepard replied.

"Ma'am." Sierra-117 didn't say anything further, instead turning to the west. Nieve followed his example in time see a SE frigate move into position far overhead. A dozen precise lances of plasma flashed out in quick succession, leaving afterimages that Nieve blinked away. Each beam struck one of the major anti-air positions covering a four hundred square kilometer region extending from just beyond the coast eight kilcks away deep into the continent.

A minute later, five black dots streaked over the western horizon. They grew larger in seconds, and Nieve was soon able to make out a pair of pelicans, with four phantoms flying top cover for them. The two transports suddenly dropped from sight, while the phantoms continued forward in formation.

He realized that they had descended to fly nap of the earth, just above the tree level when they entered the area where there were still turians present, potentially with armor, seconds before the pelicans roared over the tree line and back into sight.

They kicked up a tremendous dust storm, throwing ash high into the air and obscuring all vision as they settled into a low hover barely a foot of the ground. A squad of marines poured out of the already open back of one dropship, spreading out and securing a perimeter around the impromptu LZ.

Nieve wasted no time, and neither did any of his men or the Spartans. He hauled himself out of the foxhole, then reached down to help Shepard hoist the injured Spartan out. His men were already at climbing onto one of the pelicans, while Blue team was quickly boarding the other one.

Nieve and Shepard together helped the barely conscious Spartan to the same pelican as the rest of the ODSTs and wrestled him aboard. Nieve followed, then reached out to Shepard, helping pull her up before her bad leg gave out.

The instant she was safely inside the transport, the marines collapsed back to the pelican and climbed on in pairs, while the crew chief made sure everyone was strapped into their seats.

The pelicans rocketed upwards for a fraction of a second before streaking out across the terrain, while the phantoms kept pace overhead. Nieve watched out the back as the ash wastes vanished below, abruptly turning into vibrant jungle. Not long after, the blurred green of the forest canopy turned into a jagged coastline, and then the deep blue-green of the ocean.

When they were well clear of the coastline, the hatch closed, and Nieve felt the pelican tilt upwards, heading for a UNSC frigate orbiting the planet.

* * *

><p>[22:15 Zulu [21:46 Local], March 1, 2652 [Military Calendar]  
>UNSC <em>El Alamein<em>,  
>Orbiting Sabinan, System C-Z-0049]<p>

Nieve dropped his tray onto the table and sat down. Cong looked up from his food for a moment but Hayes and Arany continued to eat, ignoring their sergeant. Nieve ignored them in turn as he dug into his own belated dinner.

By civilian standards the food served aboard any UNSC vessel was terrible. Compared to the MREs Nieve had been eating for two days, it was godsend. Nieve and the rest of his squad ate silently, saving conversation until after all of the food was gone and they'd gone back for seconds.

"How're your ribs?" Nieve asked as Arany settled gingerly back down into her chair.

"They're holding, Sarge. The doc wants me to take it easy for a while, but fuck that. I've had cracked ribs before, and they haven't stopped me yet." She replied, before starting in on her second helping of food.

"Fine." Nieve said. "Just don't do anything stupid. Or if you do, I don't want to hear about it."

Arany nodded absently before returning her attention to her food.

"I'm not interrupting, am I, Sergeant?" A new voice asked as another tray thunked onto the small table. Shepard sat down beside Nieve, her plate piled high with food.

"Not at all, Ma'am." Nieve replied, ignoring the glares being directed at the table by the other ODSTs scattered around the room. Glares directed specifically at the Spartan, and at him for allowing her to join them.

A comfortable silence reigned for a while as Shepard quickly devoured her meal. When she was finished, began to speak again. "Nieve, I just came from a meeting with Claymore. Green team's been dissolved, since I'm the only combat effective remaining member. Claymore has, in his infinite wisdom, decided that he wants me to continue working with you, as your new team leader." She placed a sheet of paper on the table. "Here's the official order."

"Glad to have you, Ma'am." Nieve said, filling the awkward pause after Shepard finished.

"That's it?" She asked.

"You're not a butterbar, we've seen that you can hold your own in a fight, you're a goddamn Spartan to begin with and the brass have already made the call. What did you expect me to say? The jackasses in the room who're debating whether or not they can take you in a fight have never been pulled out of a tight spot by the Spartan Corps but I have, and so has the rest of the team. We'll make it work, Shepard."

If he hadn't been sitting right next to her, Nieve wouldn't have noticed Shepards body relax, especially since he hadn't realized she'd been tense to begin with. The only giveaway was a miniscule shifting of her shoulders.

"Good to hear, Nieve. There's one more thing—_El Alamein_'s being pulled back from the front. She'll be taking on wounded and leaving with a convoy for Arcturus station. We're still stationed aboard, as are Blue Team. Claymore hinted at something big, but he wouldn't say what.

"I need to borrow somebody to go over to _Peleliu_ with me. We'll be retrieving the rest of Green Team's effects for shipment home."

"I'll do it." Nieve said. "There are a couple of things we should talk over anyways, and we can do it en route."

"Thanks. Meet me in hangar four in thirty minutes." Shepard stood with a slight rustle of fatigues and retrieved a crutch Nieve hadn't noticed before. She limped of with her tray, leaving the four ODSTs alone again.

"Anybody have anything they want to say?" Nieve asked.

Cong and Arany didn't reply, but they met Nieve's eyes when he looked at them. Hayes spoke up when it was his turn. "She's pulled you and me both out of the shit before, Jon, and even banged up she's one hell of a soldier. The powers that be may be fucking around with us, but we could do much worse than the LT."

Nieve smiled ever so slightly at the comment, before he too stood and walked off.

Thirty minutes later Nieve was seated in a pelican for the second time that day, but this time no one was shooting at him. It was a definite improvement over his earlier ride. He and Shepard were strapped in facing each other as the dropship lifted off, heading for the frigate _Peleliu_, half way around the plane from them.

"That going to be a problem, LT?" Nieve asked, pointing at Shepard's singular crutch, lying on the seat beside her.

"No. My leg muscles are all torn up, but the bone is reinforced, so it's intact. By the time we get to Arcturus, it should be in good enough shape that my armor will keep me together."

The conversation lapsed briefly, until Shepard asked, "What was it you wanted to speak to me about, Sarge?"

"Your leg, mostly, LT. It's still my job to make sure that the whole team is good to go, and that includes you. Other than that, I just wanted to give you a chance to ask about the team in private."

The smile that appeared on Shepard's face was so small, and gone so quickly, Nieve would have though he imagined it if it hadn't cracked one of the multitude of scabs above her eye. "Other than Arany's ribs an my leg, we're all as healthy as can be expected, so I have nothing to ask there." Shepard said as she idly reached up with on hand and wiped a drop of blood off. "Are there any personal conflicts I should be aware of?"

"None. Cong and Arany are fairy new to the team, but they work well with the rest of us. Hayes and I both saw action on Shanxi, though we were in different squads. We've been together since just before Trayus and we haven't had a problem with each other. None of us have any problem with Spartans, either. I checked."

"That's pretty thorough of you, Sarge."

"We all go through the phase where we actually give a shit about our supposed rivalry with the Spartans, LT, but most of us get over it sooner or later. Usually about the time a Spartan team saves our asses." Nieve said.

After Nieve's final statement, the pair sat silently as they waited for their short flight to end. When the pelican reached the _Peleliu_, they disembarked, and Shepard swiftly led the way to a berthing deep inside the ship.

The grim work went quickly. While all of the Spartans had small mementoes and other reminders of their lives, they kept their personal items to a minimum. The two of them neatly packed away what they could into seabags, filling them one by one for each of the fallen members of Green team.

While Nieve was still organizing the possessions of the dead he watched Shepard turn to those of the living. She started with Green Three, efficiently filling on bag and then a second with the contents of his footlocker. Then she turned to her own possessions. He didn't see much of what she packed, beyond a small picture and her clothes. As curious as he was about his new commander's past, Nieve also knew better than to ask her about it, or the small keepsakes left over from it.

They finished without speaking. Once they were back aboard the _El Alamein _Nieve helped Shepard carry the bags where they needed to go before returning to his own berthing. With nothing better to do he went to sleep knowing that there would be more to do tomorrow as the ship he was on prepared to leave.

* * *

><p>AN: Well, crap. That took a lot longer than I meant it to and once again I've missed a self-imposed deadline. I guess that means you'll have to put up with me for a little longer. There are still only two chapters and a brief epilogue left to go, though. So theoretically speaking, it shouldn't take that much longer for me to finish this. Practically speaking, who knows?

I have a multitude of excuses for being this late, but they're just that—excuses. I won't bore you with them.

Until next time (whenever that may be).

-PT246


	17. Alea Iacata Est

_Chapter 15:_ _Alea Iacta Est_

[17:32 Zulu [12:00 Local], May 8, 2652 [Military Calendar]/  
>Contested Space, Rubicon Shipyards  
>Rubicon, Septem Collium System]<p>

Nieve relaxed in the relative luxury of the pelican. There was a veritable armada of them plunging towards the center of the orbital shipyards and the wall of incoming anti-aircraft fire coming from them. The Sabres and Seraphs at the front of the formation were already breaking off, engaging the much lighter Turian fighters in packs or making wild weasel runs on the station's defenses.

Most of the attacking force was beyond the safety blanket of point defense fire offered by their fleet, but whole squadrons of frigates, from both the UNSC and SE, were escorting them, keeping the edges of the formation secure. They couldn't use their main weapons on the station because the brass wanted the information it contained intact, but they were more than enough to deter the wolfpacks of Turian frigates that had broken free of the main engagement to target the assault force.

Behind the landing craft a massive battle was underway. A squadron of Turian dreadnoughts, supported by dozens of cruisers and scores of frigates—an entire fleet's worth—squared off against the allied forces. The space around them was broken by the bright streaks of mass accelerator fire, the eye searing beams of plasma lances, the sudden flash of contact detonated nukes and secondary explosions following the impact of MAC rounds, invisible in the blackness of space. The Turians were facing the largest fleet the UNSC and SE had put together in the entire war. For what was planned as the last major battle, all the stops had been pulled. Two Infinity-class dreadnoughts and a single assault carrier, each impossibly large by Turian standards, and each forming the backbone of a massive taskforce, bore down on the beleaguered defenders.

In three terrible years of war, the Turians had never encountered the largest ships their opponents possessed in open battle. They'd never had a chance to truly understand how utterly outclassed they were in space and had no way off comprehending that the dogged resistance of their ground forces, which had caused the war to drag on as long as it had, was useless. It was only permitted because of the terrible scars left by the Human-Covenant war, still raw century old wounds, were enough that the UNSC would rather let hundreds of thousands of soldiers die than visit the utter devastation of unrestrained MAC bombardment or the horror of glassing and the shock of planets rendered uninhabitable or shattered to pieces by a NOVA bomb on an enemy who did not threaten the fundamental existence of their people. In the end, the Turians had only made the mistake of choosing the wrong enemy to attack.

More ships burned by the minute. The Turians did not go quietly and took as many foes screaming to their deaths as they could. They fought and died, finally realizing the hopelessness of their situation. They could not win the fight. At last, from the bridge of his last dreadnought, looking at the vast vacuum revealed by the torn rent in his hull, surrounded by the broken hulks of his fleet, the Turian admiral surrendered.

Strapped into his seat with a rifle resting against his chest, Nieve knew nothing about the battle that had only just begun behind him. A small, decidedly insane part of him wished for the close confines of an HEV pod, for the rattling concussion of the launch and the adrenalin rush thrill of descent, but orbital structures could not be assaulted that way.

What he did know was that most of the allied force was not attacking the shipyards. Instead, following the doctrine that had been established in the last three years of war, they were pushing groundside, aiming to take over key civil and military positions planetside in order to secure control of the system.

A small number of transports, including his, flying directly behind the first wave of fighters, would be putting down in the shipyards. Their job was to make insertion from vacuum and seize the command center, which doubled as the central command for the entire sector of space.

The idea was that the Turians would think they were being ignored beyond the Turians destroying any ships in progress or dry dock. They had no way of knowing that the UNSC knew they were there, since the intelligence report on their location was the single most highly classified piece of materiel Nieve had ever seen. Most of the groundpounders would be ignoring the shipyards, following the standard doctrine of dealing with anything in orbit after the main assault, provided it didn't have direct offensive capabilities.

He looked around as the pelican shuddered again. The rest of his squad was sitting around him. Their visors were polarized, giving him no facial clues about their thoughts and they rigidly maintained radio silence, offering him no insights that way, but he could tell from their postures and the way they gripped their weapons or fidgeted that they were as nervous as he was about the coming battle.

Shepard was the only one he couldn't read. She was utterly impassive, seemingly frozen in place in her chair. Her armor had been repaired and her wounds had long since healed during the two months of their transit to Arcturus, planning with the fleet gathered there, and time spent en route to the Septem Collium System. During that time she'd integrated smoothly with the rest of the squad, sliding easily into place as their leader. She'd even managed to do it in such a way that Nieve's already strong respect for her had grown considerably during the process.

She caught him looking at her and nodded once, the reflective golden visor on her helmet as emotionless as the rest of her. Nieve returned the nod. Then the floor beneath them exploded.

Something, either shrapnel from the hit or the round responsible, turned Cong's legs, weapon, and most of his torso into shreds of flesh, blood, bone, various composite alloys, and a fine spray of red mist that burst outwards, coating Nieve, Arany, Hayes and Shepard's armor before what remained was flash frozen and sucked out into space. Cong's harness held the upper third of his corpse, but most of the rest was either firmly adhered to his comrade's armor or had followed his blood.

"Shit! Anybody else hit?" Nieve shouted?

"You are, Sergeant," Shepard replied gesturing to the thin stream of air visibly escaping from a small hole in the armor on his thigh. She slapped the release on her harness and stood up, activating the magnetic locks on the sides of her boots, and crossed to him, skirting around the rent in the floor.

She pulled one of the quick sealing armor patches they'd all been issued from one of her equipment pouches and placed it over the breech. Once she was sure it was firmly in place, she turned to Cong's body and unsealed his helmet. Once it was off, she dug around his neck until her hand came back holding his dog tags, which took the patch's place in the pouch. She then slid the helmet back on, hiding Cong's face and his startled expression again.

Nieve watched her in numb silence. He'd been fighting with Cong for a year and something about the abruptness of his death shocked him to his core, even though it was no more violent than hundreds of other deaths he'd witnessed, starting even before he's joined up.

"Sergeant." Shepard said. She repeated herself a little louder when he didn't respond. She slapped his helmet lightly. "Dammit, Jon, I need you with me."

Nieve shook himself lightly and refocused on the matter at hand. "I've got it, LT."

"Good. The pilots," She tapped the side of her helmet, indicating radio contact, "Say we're still in the game. We're going to hit the target in a two minutes."

"Right." He looked at Arany and Hayes while switching to the squad wide channel. "We're down in two. Final checks, then let's go." The checks were useless. They'd already done them twice before boarding. If anything was wrong with their armor seals, they would have found out the hard way when the pelican had depressurized after the hit. They were, however, a perfect way to keep everybody's minds off of what was about to happen and what had just happened through the mindless repetition they represented.

Eventually, the back hatch of the pelican opened. One by one the squad clunked out into space, moving as fast as the mag boots would let them. They spread out, watching for Turians until the dropship's engines flared and it roared away.

Before it vanished into the swirling chaos of the fighter battle overhead, a streak of redshifted light slammed into the middle of the pelican, the slug at it's head blowing open the side of the craft and knocking it off course. Somehow the pilots managed to straighten out after a desperate second of maneuvering before rocketing off towards the relative safety of the frigate they'd launched from.

"All Vengeance units," Cortana announced over the radio, "The birds have spotted us and are deploying reaction teams."

"Great," Hayes said. "Anyone else glad they gave us Z-G refresher training back at Arcturus?"

"Yeah, it's going to be really fucking helpful in a few minutes. Now shut the fuck up and keep moving." Nieve replied. Following his own advice, he began to run across the surface of the station, doing his best to ignore the vertigo caused by the planet looming overhead.

Shepard was already moving ahead of him. She ran smoothly, adjusting her stride to the release of the mag boots with the sort of ease that only came from years of practice. The rest of the squad followed her along the hull until they reached a three meter high ridge of raised plaiting with a line of anti-air turrets mounted on top.

The concussion from the turrets firing couldn't pass through the vacuum but the shock of recoil still shook Nieve as they contributed to the battle beyond, tracking and firing almost continuously.

"Vengeance Alpha, this is Vengeance Charlie. We're at the first defensive position. There are no birds in sight." Shepard reported.

"Rodger that, Charlie. We're moving to your position now. Bravo and Echo are encountering resistance at their LZs, and Delta was shot down." Cortana replied again.

"Understood, Alpha." Shepard turned to the squad. "Arany, get up on that ridge and keep an eye out for birds. Don't use the jump pack."

Arany had been about to trigger the pack she'd been issued for the mission before Shepard finished speaking. Instead, she walked up to the wall, planted one foot on it, and moved upwards with the aid of her mag boots. Nieve spared a moment to envy the easy way she moved in zero gravity. He'd always had trouble shaking the up and down orientation from coming out of an airlock. In training one of his instructors had repeatedly told him that the enemy was always down, but that had never made any sense to him either.

At he end of her climb Arany curled inwards towards where her feet were planted on the wall until she could grab the edge of the ridge with her hands. She disengaged her boot and hung free for a moment before hauling herself effortlessly upwards, keeping low as she slid onto the top.

Nieve and the rest of the squad spread out behind what cover they could find and waited, Vengeance Alpha, consisting of Blue team, still under the command of the Master Chief, and a SE black ops unit of Elites arrived within two minutes.

"Bravo's managed to clear their LZ. They're moving to support Echo now." Cortana said. "We'll breach now and they'll move to support us when they're able."

"Got it," Shepard replied.

Nieve kept watching outwards while one of Blue team placed explosives on the side fo the turret emplacement behind them. With only a rough knowledge of Turian design principles, it had been decided during planning that it would be easier to enter through a maintenance tunnel than an airlock, which would be heavily defended. Once they were through, they had to find their way to the rough center of the station, where the Turians generally kept their command centers, protected by layers of armor and other compartments.

"Contact." Arany called from her position above them. "I make one platoon sized element moving towards us from the far side of the ridge. An additional squad is moving down the ridge."

"Fuck." Nieve swore. "Ma'am, permission to engage using packs?"

"Go. Take Hayes and slow down the squads coming down the ridge. Arany, start hitting that platoon."

A single controlled blast from his jet pack sent Nieve hurdling along the ridge, closely followed by Hayes, as the rest of the assault team began to climb into position to help Arany. The breaching process they were defending was quick, but having a larger enemy force chasing them while they were fighting through a fortified complex would be an extremely bad idea.

A second quick burst from his jets allowed Nieve to reorient himself midflight and a third slammed him down to the hull a solid two hundred meters from the breaching point. Using the magnetic grips on their boots, he and Hayes climbed the ridge the same way Arany had, careful to present the lowest possible profiles as they reached the top.

Nieve's radio carried the sounds of a firefight—mostly cursing, brief instructions and warnings, since they were still in a vacuum—from Alpha and the rest of his own squad while he slipped into position at the base of another anti-air turret with Hayes, hoping that the flare of their jetpacks hadn't been spotted.

The advancing Turian patrol was still fifty meters from their position and moving slowly, checking the ridge in front of them with admirable caution. Nieve's first shot staggered the squad's point man, decreasing his shields. The following double tap drilled through the weakened armor at his neck. The body collapsed backwards, it's feet still locked in place by mag boots.

The rest of the squad scattered, taking cover behind the turrets while desperately searching for the origin of the shots. It didn't take long for them to find it when Hayes joined Nieve, his assault rifle providing a slightly less accurate but much more formidable hail of bullets that complemented the steady, precise shots from Nieve's DMR.

Another Turian died before Nieve was forced to duck behind the turret he was braced against to avoid return fire.

"Eight to go, Sarge." Hayes said, watching as the Turians began to advance again under the weight of their covering fire.

"Yeah, that might be a problem." Nieve replied. He squeezed off another shot, sending one of the approaching Turians diving for cover as his shields failed. "It only takes one armor breach to put them out of the fight, but I can't get enough shots through."

Hayes fired a burst of his own. "Fuck Z-G, Sarge. I hate fighting competent people in it, and let's face it. The birds know what they're doing."

Nieve didn't bother replying. He was too busy shooting at the Turian who'd been caught in the open. It crumpled to the hull as Nieve hid from the return fire.

"Shepard, we can't hold much longer. The birds are keeping us tied down."

"Rodger that. Wait one." Shepard said distractedly.

A raspy, guttural voice broke into the conversation. "We will hold the Turians here, Demon. Take your men and continue the mission."

"Nieve, Hayes, fall back. We're going in." Shepard said.

Before they left, Nieve pulled a small mine from his pack and attached it to the side of the turret as a final surprise for the Turians reached their position. Then the two of them triggered their jet packs once again, trusting to the combination of shields and speed to keep them safe as they flew towards the rest of their unit.

They did, but only by pure luck. Nieve had once head a fellow ODST deride the jet packs because they turned soldiers into targets, and he had to admit that the woman, drunk as she had been, still had a point as rounds streaked by him and others sparked off his shields. Unfortunately, there wasn't any other way to move effectively in Z-G, and they doubled as a safety feature when properly used. Even on the ground they had advantages.

None of which was enough to stop the continuous stream of semi-vocalized curses, voiced just quietly enough to avoid being picked up by the helmet's microphone.

"Fuck!" He swore, loud enough to be heard this time, when a green blast from one of the Elite heavy weapons specalists fuel rod guns flew past, barely missing him before it exploded just in front of the Turians, dramatically increasing the incoming fire for a second.

He landed beside Shepard. She was standing below the ridge beside the hole Blue Team's explosive expert had blown in it, which was covered by a hastily erected portable airlock that had been appropriated from a ship's damage control stores. The two layers of hardened plastic had been brought in by one of the other teams so they could improvise entry without having to worry about leaving a trail of compromised compartments behind them.

"Get in," Shepard said, waving towards the airlock. "The Chief's already taken Alpha on ahead."

"How bad is it?" Nieve asked as he passed through.

"Pretty bad. A second squad flanked us along the ridge on the opposite approach from you. That means there are to platoons attacking us, and one of their squads in unaccounted for. The Sangheili are going to be busy.

"It gets worse. Two platoons to hit us and another one each for Bravo and Delta. Three platoons make a bird company, so two more somewhere on the surface of the station, plus whatever's still inside."

"Did the brass plan on any of us actually coming back, LT?"

Amazingly, Shepard laughed. It was a cold, hard and distinctly unpleasant sound that sent chills down the back of Nieve's neck. "That's why they sent Spartans." She slapped him on the shoulder. "Now get going."

"Right," Nieve replied sardonically as Hayes came through the airlock and they started down the passage. "So, any plans for getting from a turret maintenance access way to a hardened command center in the middle of this fucking station?

"I'm handling that, Sergeant." Cortana broke in. "I've breached the Turian firewall and I have control of a number of subroutines, including—" The AI cut herself off. "Chief, there's an ambush on the other side of that hatch. Watch yourself."

"I've got it," The Master Chief's smooth voice replied. "Open it in three."

Precisely three seconds later, the hatch at the end of the cramped access tunnel slid open and the first three members of Blue Team stormed through the opening, led by the Master Chief.

For all of their training and enhancements, fighting in zero gravity had set upper bounds on the capabilities of the Spartans. Now that they were back on a rough approximation of solid ground they had no such limits. By the time Nieve entered the room, followed by the rest of his squad, ten seconds later, it was already over.

Two full squads of Turians were dead on the deck. The Spartans had killed the twenty defenders effortlessly, reversing the ambush and turning it into a slaughter. The machine gun that had been set up facing the hatch hadn't even had time to fire before it's operators had been unceremoniously killed. The other eighteen Turians had been killed shortly after.

"We're in a maintenance compartment. Most of the hatches lead to different tunnels like the one we just exited. The second to the right leads to the main passageway." Cortana said. "I'm sealing off all other access to it. It should be relatively free of enemies."

"Good." The Master Chief replied. "Let's go."

The passageway they entered was low, designed with economy of space in mind and with an eye towards. The bulkheads were bare, making no attempt to hide the various pipes and bundles of wire needed to make a space station run. To Nieve, it resembled the engineering spaces of UNSC warships, which he avoided as much as possible as on general principle.

It was also undefended, to Nieve's relief. A firefight through the constrained passageway would have been lethal to at lest some of the assault team. He guessed the group that had tried to ambush them had been the only troops that could have reached them quickly.

When they reached the main passageway Cortana spoke again. "Their cyberdefense systems are blocking me from accessing the security cameras on the far side of the hatch, so watch yourselves."

"Can you get the hatch, or do we need to breach it?" Shepard asked.

"I've got it. Opening in ten." The AI said. Immediately, everyone stacked up on the hatch, weapons ready. One of the Spartans prepared a grenade.

"Three, two—" Cortana was cut off by an explosion. The hatch shattered inwards, sending a hail of superheated fragments back towards Nieve as a stream of Turians poured through the gap, weapons firing.

They'd been caught by surprise, but the Spartan team and the ODSTs had one major advantage. By breaching the hatch themselves and attacking, the Turians had taken the offensive, however briefly, and turned the fight into a close quarters brawl.

Nieve saw Hayes die, stabbed with a glowing blade after he'd been sent reeling with a rifle butt. He had no time to help his friend. Desperately, he shot at a Turian who was charging at him, hoping to stop the soldier before it reached him. The fight raged all around him as combatants from both sides ran out of ammunition or overheated and turned to weapons of desperation. Rifle butts, feet, fists and blades of all sorts were furiously employed as the combat degenerated into vicious melee that would not have looked out of place hundreds or even thousands of years in the past.

The Turian he was shooting at died messily, it's chest torn open by half a magazine's worth of desperate fire. Nieve sighted on another, feeling grateful that he'd been at the back, when something slammed into his side, sending him topping to the ground. His forearm rose reflexively, pushing aside the arm of the Turian who'd tackled him and blocking the downward strike of the alien's orange tinted holographically lit blade.

His other hand dropped his rifle and scrabbled for the pistol at his side while trying to fend of his attacker one handed. He quickly abandoned the doomed attempt grab the pistol, instead reaching for any firm grip he could find on his opponent's armor.

His right hand locked onto the spur rising from the Turian's leg while he clamped down on his wrist with his left. He started to roll, using the leverage his position gave him, but the Turian out massed him and threw it's full weight down on Nieve's chest, stopping the movement. With it's free arm, it drew it's own pistol and smashed it down on the side of Nieve's helmet.

Momentarily stunned, Nieve could only watch his opponent's armored, freakish visage as it sighted down the barrel of the pistol at him, far to close for shields to effectively block the shot.

The sharp bark of a pistol firing point-blank range was deafening, even with the ear protection his helmet provided. The Turian collapsed on top of Nieve, dark blue blood mixing with chunks of flesh and brain matter dripping from the crater in the side of it's helmeted head. An armored boot entered Nieve's field of vision, kicking the dead alien off of him.

"You okay, Sarge?" Arany asked, offering him a hand.

"Fuck," Nieve groaned as she pulled him up. "I've been better." He bent down again, collecting his rifle. The room around him was strewn with bodies, almost all of them Turian.

He crossed to where Hayes lay and knelt beside him. Knowing it was hopeless, he checked his friend's neck for a pulse. Hayes' status light flashed red on his HUD, and despite wanting to, he couldn't deny the shattered visor and deep gash across his face. With a heavy sigh, Nieve closed the corporal's eyes and collected his dog tags.

A hand rested gently on his shoulder. He knew without looking that it was Shepard, even though he hadn't heard her approach.

"Jon, we need to move."

"I know." He quickly stripped the dead man of grenades and ammo and handed them back to Shepard. "Spread them around," he said. She nodded and walked away as he took the plasma grenade he'd saved and placed it under the body so that all of Hayes' weight was on the activation button.

Nieves stood and looked around. Several of the Spartans appeared to have minor wounds, but they were ignoring them. Arany was limping, but her armor was undamaged, so it was just a bruise, though probably a deep one from the way she was hobbling. Half of Blue Team, including the Master Chief, were missing. The only clue to their location was the chatter of gunfire in through the ruined hatch.

He slammed a fresh magazine into his rifle and racked the charging handle. "I'm good. Let's get this over with."

"Right. Cortana, where to next?" Shepard asked.

"Follow the passageway for now. IT should take you from maintanence access to the main military sections of the station. I've restricted access to it, so resistance should be light until you get close to the command center.

"Alpha-Two are reporting that attacks on the entry point have ceased. They're entering the station along with the survivors of Bravo and Delta. I'm directing them down an alternate route, with an RV just outside the control center."

"Rodger that. Chief, it's your show." Shepard said.

"Ma'am," The Master Chief acknowledged. "Advance in two section. Five and Six, you're with the LT." The gunfire beyond the hatch stopped. "P-way's clear. Let's move."

Nieve spent the next hour moving cautiously, leapfrogging up the passage way with the Spartans that had been assigned to bolster Shepard's squad and the other section of Blue Team. Cortana's initial programming was over a century old, but she'd had time to go metastable, and had augmented her cyberwarfare suit considerably with programs of her own design during the intervening decades between her disappearance and the rescue of Spartan-117. Additionally, she'd downloaded the UNSC's latest intrusion and control programs before the mission began. The only systems she couldn't access were those of the command center at the heart of the station, which had automatically severed all connections to it's own secure internal network the moment the resident VI became aware of the attacks on the station network.

When she locked down hatches and doors, they stayed locked down. The Turians relied almost exclusively on heavily constrained, non-adaptable virtual intelligences to handle their own cyberwarfare programs. They were no match for Cortana. The Turian soldiers who had the initiative to bring up explosives, hull cutters, or even their own, strictly limited intrusion programs on their omni-tools had no better luck. When she could, the AI vented the compartments they were in to space. When they couldn't she simply isolated them from all electrical systems. After all, doors with no power couldn't be hacked, and the manual overrides took time to engage.

By the time any of the doors were forced, there were Spartans waiting on the far side. The skirmishes that followed were inevitably short, sharp, and utterly one sided.

At the end of an hour of steady movement, interspersed with sporadic violence, Blue Team and Shepard's squad had reached the set of reinforced hatches that separated the Turian command center from the rest of the station. However, they were no longer alone. When they'd arrived, the floor had already been carpeted with dead soldiers. The other half of Alpha, along with Bravo and Delta, had beaten them to the objective.

Not all of the bodies were Turian this time. Large numbers of Spartan Vs were active on all fronts of the war, but UNSC command had only been able to spare Blue Team from the dozen or so major planetary battles ongoing at any given moment. The rest of the Vengeance teams had been drawn from the ODSTs and Sangheili Empire special operations units.

Alpha-Two, Bravo, and Delta had been forced to make an attack down a hundred meter stretch of barren passageway, through a deliberately designed killzone where the only cover was at the far end, occupied by the defenders. There was a limit to what personal shields could do, and they had taken casualties. Ultimately, the defense had only been broken by a combination fuel rod fire and Elites using optical camouflage to approach to melee range.

The survivors had already rigged the large hatch with heavy-duty charges designed to specifically to blast through armored emplacements. They were the same sort of explosive that Blue Team had used to breach the outer hull of the station in the first place, and were, in Nieve's opinion, probably overkill. Or would have been, if he actually believed in overkill.

Nieve took his place beside Shepard, behind one of the half height defensive wall that the Turians were so fond of. The rest of the squad hunkered down around them, along with most Bravo and Delta. For all of their institutional rivalry, the ODSTs were happy to let the Spartans and the Elites take point for the moment while they positioned themselves to provide fire support.

The blast as the charges detonated was enough to shake the passageway. Shards of reinforced titanium, superheated by the explosion, flew inwards, moving with enough force to eviscerate any defenders standing in their path.

There were none. The fury of the explosion was wasted on a kinetic barrier just inside the hatch. The capacitors powering it quickly overloaded, and the barrier fizzled out, but it had served its purpose. The opening moments of the attack had been blunted.

Alpha flowed fluidly into the room, advancing into a storm of mass accelerator fire from a platoon's worth of guards that had been pulled back to the final defensive positions at the entrance to the crowded command center. Earlier, the five Spartans of Blue Team alone had been sufficient to deal with a platoon, but this time they were facing a properly entrenched and well-supported enemy, and they were quickly bogged down.

Behind them, the ODSTs and Shepard traded fire with the Turians. In moments, the battled turned into a stalemate, where superior training was counterbalanced by careful preparation. Nieve saw one of his compatriots shredded by fire as she leant out of cover, disintegrating into chunks flesh, metal and splatters of blood.

"Grenade!" Someone shouted, as a disk shaped object flew through the air, adhering itself to the ground behind Nieve. He reacted without thought, diving away towards another one of little walls, trusting his shields and armor to protect him long enough. Beside him, Shepard did the same, while Arany threw herself in another direction.

She wasn't fast enough. The edges of the blast caught her, slamming her against the bulkhead with enough force to break bones through armor. She slid to the ground, semi-conscious, but thankfully out of the line of fire.

Nieve didn't have time to worry about her. The moment he reached the relative safety of another position, he was firing again. He spared a single glance towards her, confirming the information on his HUD that was telling him she was still alive.

The firefight dragged on, both sides loosing soldiers, without coming any closer to a resolution. The Spartans and the Elites, normally enough to ensure a complete victory in a battle, could have forced a resolution, but they didn't want to.

They weren't there to kill Turians. They weren't even there to reduce a sector command center to slag and decapitate the chain of command. Those were simply side effects of their true mission. All of the bullets flying though the air simply served as a very effective distraction.

The Turian communications techs that normally would have spotted what was going on were somewhat preoccupied with staying alive. The alarms their consoles were drowned out by gunfire or ignored in the heat of the moment.

"Finished," Cortana announced. The hail of bullets and plasma flying through the air intensified briefly as the Spartans and Elites fell back through the shattered hatch. As they cleared it, ODST rushed forwards, placing and activating stationary shields generators. Translucent purple barriers sprang into place, blocking return fire while the attackers consolidated and gathered their wounded.

The power supplies of the stationary shields quickly failed under the weight of fire the Turians poured into them, but they'd served their purpose. The entire Vengeance task force was solidly in cover, ready to move, by the time they ran out of power.

The Turians had a moment to see what was coming towards them before the fuel rods hit. The two Elite heavy weapons specialists had kept out the earlier fight, because the damage they would have done to the command center was unacceptable. Now that they finished what they came to do, it was a happy side effect.

Nieve contributed by adding grenades to the mix, along with most of the ODSTs. It wasn't as effective as a proper demolition charge would have been, but there hadn't been enough space to carry them as well as all of the ammunition, shaped breaching charges, and other implements of destruction and supplies that had been needed.

It was still more than enough to wreck everything in the room, including the soldiers defending it.

Their task finished, the task force stripped the dead of their gear and dog tags, prepped the wounded for transport, and began the slow task of fighting their way towards the exfil point.

* * *

><p>AN 2: It's been less than a day since I first posted this, and I've already received an impressive number of reviews concerning my statements about glassing.

I originally said that, "The UNSC would rather let millions of soldiers die than" glass a planet or do any equivalent using the various different technologies they have available. Several people asked me about this, and I amended it to read hundreds of thousands, rather than millions, because they had a good point. A million dead is a lot of bodies, even for a galactic scale civilization. A couple hundred thousand is still a lot, but it's somewhat more reasonable.

People still seem to have difficulty with the idea of not wanting to glass planets at all, though. It made sense to me when I wrote it, or I wouldn't have, but I want to address some of the reasoning behind it here, because I'm getting tired of writing variations on the same review reply.

There are two major reasons for this. The first is public opinion, and the second is the idea of a limited war. Please note that when I use the term glassing, it's really a catch all for anything that can destroy a planet or render it uninhabitable, including, but not limited to, things like NOVA bombs.

Public opinion: In short, the citizens of the UNSC are utterly against glassing. It's a consequence of having been on the receiving end of them during the Human/Covenant War. They're a distant memory for the oldest portion of the population, but basically everyone else alive had parents, grandparents, or great-grandparent who fought in or lived through the war. A very small number of them are survivors of glassings, but almost all of them knew somebody who died on a planet as it was glassed by the Covenant. All of them saw what was left after the war was over. And all of them, without fail, passed the horror of those experience down to their children who passed it down in turn, and so on. This has resulted in a massive cultural stigma against glassing. If you want to look at something that's roughly analogous, take the Japanese policy towards and opinion on nuclear weapons. For more information, take a look at the Wikipedia page "Japan's non-nuclear weapons policy".

If the UNSC were to start glassing planets for any reason short of being in a war to ensure the continued existence of mankind as a species, there would be massive public outcry, which is something that the politicians don't want to deal with back home, and the Admirals in charge of the fleets don't want to be responsible for.

This actually leads pretty well into my second point on why glassing isn't a viable strategy.

Limited War: To quote von Clausewitz, "War is a continuation of politics by other means." In addition to this, Sun Tzu said, "In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good." (These may vary slightly depending on the translation you happen to have access to, or if you can read them in the original language.)

In other terms, war is not fought for war's own sake. It's fought with a viable objective in mind, and very rarely does that objective permit the utter destruction of your opponent's territory, particularly in the case of limited war.

The concept of total war vs. limited war is both relatively new and very old. It's not mentioned much, because for a great deal of history, most of what was fought was limited wars, where the objective was to gain territory without destroying it, instead of total war, where you simply eliminate absolutely everything the enemy has. For reference, the idea of total war made what is arguably it's first modern appearance in the American Civil War, perhaps best exemplified by Sherman's March To The Sea, where he burned his way in a swath across the South, destroying anything that he wasn't using to support his army to deny it's use to the enemy. World War II was a total war. More recent conflicts, such as Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, ect. were limited wars.

Both the UNSC and the Turians are fighting from the perspective of a limited war. In a galactic scale conflict, many things that we currently, based on the last century of human history, associate with total war are acceptable in a limited war, but the idea of fighting for a precise goal, rather than eliminating everything your enemy has still remains. In case you haven't figured it out yet, the Human/Covenant War was a total war, not a limited one.

However, glassing a planet is unquestionably a weapon of total war, using it would almost automatically escalate the conflict from a limited war to a total war, and it would bring the rest of the council races into the fight as well, changing the balance of power. Neither side has any interest in doing this. As it stands, the UNSC is fighting to make a point-you don't want to mess with them, and they want everybody to know it. The war's dragged on for three years, and they're actually working to bring things to the negotiating table, because they've made that point. They may or may not end up holding some or all of the territory they've acquired, but the possibility of retaining any of it is enough to make sure they don't destroy it out of hand. The Turians are mostly fighting because the UNSC is bringing the fight to them. They aren't quite ready to give up, but they've been loosing, slowly but steadily, for the last three years. At the beginning, the were trying to gain more territory and possibly another client race, but they miscalculated, and ended up facing a previously undiscovered galactic civilization that happened to be just as good at war, if not better, then they were, and were angry at them to boot.

That miscalculation doesn't make them evil. It just means they screwed up and they're paying the price. Both sides acknowledge this in their own way. Maybe, if the UNSC hadn't had a couple of windfalls of information about the Turians and the Mass Effect universe in general, they'd would be pursuing a total war. But between the data that was scavenged from the wrecked ships above Shanxi-let's assume they got hold of a codex, for simplicity's sake, although it would have been more fragmented and disorganized then that-and the information Liara gave them after her capture, they decided that there was no need to go on a genocidal rampage to protect humanity and their allies. Every single flag officer in the UNSC knows about this decision, and so do most of the field grade and junior officers. They didn't get to where they are by being idiots, after all.

In summary, no war or conflict ever exists in a vacuum. There are always reasons for what's done and what isn't done. Sometimes they're political, sometimes religious, sometimes strategic. Sometimes what's done isn't the best move strategically, because it's determined that another concern has a higher priority. The military hates it when politicians meddle in the business of winning a war properly, but that doesn't stop it from happening. It never has, and it never will. Finally, sometimes the best move in terms of pure military strategy isn't the best move to win the war, because the politics that are the root cause of the war are based on more than just military realities. In this case, the decision not to glass planets is made based on a number of reasons, running the gauntlet from strategic to political.

-PT246  
>04:38 Zulu, April 25, 2013<p>

* * *

><p>AN: [Insert usual collection of excuses for being late here. tl;dr real life]

This one has gone through more drafts than any other chapter I've written, except possibly the next one.

A quick note on the terminology used in this chapter: For the most part I've been sticking to naval terms for the space station. Bulkhead for wall, hatch for door, passageway for hallway, ect. There are a couple reasons for this although it mostly boils down to because I think it sounds better this way.

Unlike anything we actually see in the Mass Effect games, the station is 100% Turian military. I feel like that would be reflected in a more utilitarian design, and for that, the naval terms seemed to fit better. I actually used both hatch and door, with the idea that hatches are basically solid, armored, airtight, and can be mechanically operated in an emergency, while doors are basically what we see in game, holographic locks and all.

The other big this is this is the chapter where I threw balance out the window. For most of Convergence, I've tried to present both sides as an even threat to each other, but really, they aren't. On the ground, they're about equal, but in space, the UNSC and the SE are far superior.

Additionally, once Spartans or Elites come into play, there really isn't anything the Turians have that can match it. Biotics and the tech specialists go some ways towards fixing the discrepancy, but not really. This isn't the first chapter where Nieve and company have run roughshod over the Turians, but they've always had help. Orbital fire support, reinforcements, luck, and so on and so forth. In this chapter, it just happened to be a team of Spartans, Elites, and a bunch of other helljumpers.

-PT246


	18. Interlude III: Resolutions

_Interlude III: Resolutions_

_[Citadel Council Meeting Audio Records]_

_Councilor Nostros: _Well, they're certainly making a point.

_Councilor Kirosa: _Indeed.

_Councilor Pallin_: Typical humans. They're bending our agreement to their advantage.

_Nostros: _I don't follow.

_Kirosa:_ _Infinity-_Class dreadnought. According to the data we were able to obtain on Shanxi, the first of the class was launched almost a century ago, and they remain unmatched by anything else in the UNSC fleet.

_Pallin:_ And it's pushing the 'one ship' clause of our agreement to the limit. _Infinity_-Class ships have been observed launching frigates from internal bays the few times we were unlucky enough to end up fighting them.

_Nostros:_ I see. In that case, they're making several points, and making them well, I might add. [Pause] Has there been any further word from T'Soni?

_Pallin: _Not since she informed us that the delegation was en route. And relax a little, we'd have been told if anything new came in from her.

_Nostros:_ For some reason I don't think you have any ground to tell me to relax, Lantar. After all, we're not the ones fighting a loosing war.

_Pallin: _That doesn't mean you're not tense.

_Kirosa:_ He's right. We all need to present a calm front if we want to keep the humans off balance. They're already negotiating from a position of strength, there's no need to give them any other advantages.

_Pallin:_ I still don't get when they even asked us for this summit.

_Kirosa:_ Everything the STG has been able to turn up, which isn't much, given how the humans have closed their borders to any neutrals from Citadel Space or the Terminus, agrees with what T'Soni reported.

_Pallin:_ That's not what I meant; I agree with you there. I just don't think it makes any sense. They've demonstrated both the capability and willingness to completely defeat us. I don't like admitting it, but it's the truth. If they decide to keep going, we'll eventually loose without outside help.

_Nostros:_ As militant as they are, they aren't Turians. For them, stopping short of a complete military victory might be acceptable.

_Pallin: _Why? I've seen the data we sized on the Human-Covenant War. How could they not simply lash out and try to utterly destroy anyone who harms them, especially given how it ended?

_Nostros: _I'm still not sure we actually know how it ended. There are a lot of gaps in the records of the last two or three years, and the rest of it fits together a little too well.

_Kirosa: _A coverup?

_Nostros: _Possibly. It could be the truth, but it looks like an attempt to hide what really happened to me.

_Pallin: _Interesting, but why would they want to hide how the war ended?

_Nostros:_ I don't know. That's where my little theory breaks down. Regardless, about your original question, I think they might be tired of war. Before the Human-Covenant War, they'd been fighting a persistent insurgency with a few nasty pitched battles and since the war ended they've found themselves dealing with the same insurgency and the remnants of the Covenant. They haven't been truly at peace for more than a century and a half.

_Kirosa:_ Additionally, they've accomplished their stated political goals for this war. Attempting to completely defeat the Hierarchy would bring my people and the Asari into the war, significantly increasing it's scope. They've made it clear that they won't be conquered, and from their point of view, finding themselves at war with the rest of the galaxy would be unacceptable.

_Pallin: [Sigh] _The delegation will be arriving soon. We should start preparing to meet them. Hopefully we'll be able to work out terms for peace.

_Nostros: _Hopefully. I wouldn't hold out on them joining Council Space, though. Not after the last three years. At best, they might become an unaligned power with a few trade agreements. They probably won't even tell us where their home planet is.

_Kirosa: _It's still better than continuing this war, now that we have the opportunity to end it.

* * *

><p><em>UEG President Rostami's speech Commemorating the Hundredth Anniversary of the Fall of Reach, given at the Remember Reach Memorial [Aug 30, 2652]:<em>

People of the Unified Earth Government, today is a day of solemn remembrance, but it is also a day where we should be looking forward, thinking of what is to come. Traditionally, the thirtieth of August has been used to mark the Fall of Reach. On this day, at this hour, a century ago, the Halcyon-class cruiser _The Pillar of Autumn_ broke through the Fleet of Particular Justice and fled the system, carrying aboard it the salvation of mankind. Covering it's escape were the last remnants of Noble Team, the Spartan III unit who's heroic actions in defense of this planet would only be declassified fifty years later, so they could at long last receive the recognition they deserved.

_The Pillar of Autumn_ was never seen again in human space. She was lost to enemy action, from which only a few escaped to return, by a long and torturous route, to Earth. While the precise details of her destruction have been lost to time, as the survivors were never able to offer a clear account, it is worth remembering the words of the Arbiter of Sanghelios, who commanded the attack on Reach and the pursuit of _The Pillar of Autumn_:

Captain Jacob Keyes, and the sailors and marines under his command, were the finest enemies I ever fought, and one amongst them would become one of my greatest friends in the dark times ahead. They faced us with all the relentless valor and unflinching courage I had come to expect from humanity, and more. The losses they inflicted on my forces far outweighed their numbers, and they have, to me, always been a paragon of achievement; a pinnacle of what mankind is capable of. I shall never forget them or their sacrifices, and I have always striven to honor them and the ideals they represented in my dealings with humanity ever since.

The small handful who reached Earth would go on to play a critical role in the events to come, and were ultimately responsible for both saving Earth and convincing the Sangheili to join us in our fight against the Covenant. The UEG as we know it stands as their legacy, guarded and protected by the UNSC that they served so faithfully.

Of all of them, though he stands only as first amongst equals in the rolls of the missing and the dead, none is more worthy of remembrance than Master Chief Petty Officer Spartan-117, who was raised and trained on this very planet, and who continued to fight the Covenant even after the one place he could call home had been destroyed, a tragedy shared by millions of his brothers- and sisters-in-arms after a quarter century of war.

Now more than ever, his example cannot be forgotten. Now we are engaged in a great war, against a hostile alien race, who struck without warning. The valor of the men and women of the UNSC, along with our allies, the Sangheili Empire, has held them at bay, and later, when we had regained our footing after the dreadful surprises at Shanxi, has pushed our enemies back into their own territory. They have shown the galaxy that we will stand up for ourselves and that we will not let our territory be attacked.

Not long into this Second Contact War a scout ship that was tracking a Turian vessel in hopes of finding one of their hidden bases made a miraculous discovery and immediately reported it so action could be taken. It found, orbiting a planet of ruins, the after half of the frigate _Forward Unto Dawn_ and aboard it, still preserved in cryogenic slumber, the Master Chief. He was woken, and immediately, without question and without hesitation, threw himself into battle once more, because for him, it always has been and always will be his duty to protect humanity.

Upon awakening, his only request was to be allowed to go back into service quietly, without any of the ceremony and recognition he so richly deserved. UNSC decided to grant his request. How could they not? Perhaps if the war had been going badly, if moral had been in desperate need of a boost, they would have denied him and subjected him to the endless rounds of pomp and ceremony, turning him into a living symbol, but they did not.

Today, as I speak, he begins another mission, one of paramount importance, and he will once again have a hand in ending a war. For the last year, working through backchannels and neutral powers, we have begun the process of bringing the Turians to the negotiating table. The Master Chief now serves as a senior member of the mixed team of Spartans and Sangeheili that are escorting an equally mixed team of delegates, led by none other than Thel 'Vadam, the Arbiter himself. Their goal is simple: They are to bring theses three years of war to a close.

Because, ultimately, as we stand here on Reach, before a memorial to the countless dead, a reminder of our darkest hour, here on a planet reborn from the fires of war and healed of her scars, how can we do anything but think of peace? There have been enough dead heroes in the last three years. It's time to prove that we can be the better people, and seek and end to a conflict that has spiraled out of all proportion and which has repaid in kind every indignity on Shanxi. Here and now, on the anniversary of a defeat which seemed to spell an end to all our hopes and dreams, and to our very survival itself, I ask for peace.


	19. Epilouge: The Silence of Answers

_Epilogue: The Silence of Answers_

[22:12 Zulu [22:12 Local] Oct 2, 2652 [Military Calendar]/  
>SS <em>Sleepless, <em>En Route to Geart Colony/  
>Slipspace]<p>

For Nieve, there was something downright unnerving about traveling onboard a civilian spaceship. As an ODST and as a Marine before that, his experience with spacecraft was almost exclusively military. He was used to bare bulkheads, obvious airlocks separating compartments, and stenciled numbers over every hatch that were alpha-numeric gibberish to civilians, but told the various servicemen aboard precisely where they were and what the room was for. They had, all things considered, a distinctly utilitarian feel to them, particularly in the labyrinthine engineering spaces.

Civilian vessels had none of that, at least in the spaces he was allowed to access. Admittedly, what seemed to him like an abundance of creature comforts after his time in the field was regarded by most of his fellow passengers as a meager, bare-bones existence, hardly worth being called civilized. For them, even the modern miracle of travel through slipspace, bypassing such trivial rationalities as conventional space-time while they transited through seven higher order dimensions only tenuously connected to realspace was a necessary inconvenience forced on them by traveling through the so called 'old colonies', unreachable by the mass relay network.

To him, it still seemed decidedly off to be traveling in such relative luxury, in civilian clothes, without any armor and with a four inch folding knife as his only weapon. He had a sidearm, along with a full pack of survival essentials stowed in his cabin, within easy reach of his bed, but he couldn't shake the feeling of inherent wrongness.

There was more to it than just the strangeness and the difference from the routine that had been governing his life for years. The feeling had persisted through the month it had taken him to get to the front lines to Reach, traveling on ships redeploying to the edge of Brute Space, still fresh from the recently finished war.

It had begun when Shepard found him in the mess and approached, her normally impassive face grim and drawn, to ask for a quick word. She had the unfortunate dual role of being the harbinger of both the best and worst news of his life. He would have asked for the bad news first—he always did, it made it easier—but she started before he could say anything.

"Jon," She said, her use of his first name unprecedented and a warning in and of itself, "It's not common news, but the war is essentially over. It has been since the ceasefire was declared for negotiations. According to the latest traffic, the treaty is due to be ratified tomorrow and returned via the relay network within the next three days.

"Everyone who's been on the front lines for more than a month is due leave. You've been fighting nonstop since the start of the war, so you'll probably get extra. Long enough to go home if you want to."

She paused and took a deep breath before meeting his eyes. "And you probably should. Geart got hit by the Brutes again. Your sister was one of the casualties. She's still alive, but that's all I was told." Her inflection didn't change as she delivered the news, but something in her eyes made Nieve think that she'd seen the violence of a Brute raid herself, and from the receiving end, rather than picking up the pieces afterword.

He didn't react for a moment. He couldn't. Dealing with the stresses of combat was second nature for him after so long in the military, but bad news from a place more than a decade in his past about a family member he hadn't seen in nearly as long, was enough to cause him to lock up completely. His brain refused to function as it tried to comprehend what Shepard had said.

Sarah, his sister, had been hurt—badly, or he wouldn't have been told about it—while, the ODST, one of the elite, had been thousands of light years away, fighting on a different front of a different war. He knew that she was an army trooper, capable of taking care of herself and willing to take most of the same risks he took, for the same reasons, but that didn't make it better. If anything, it made it worse.

Ultimately, he'd had just enough presence of mind to tell Shepard he would go home before he fled to his quarters to wrestle with the enormity of what she'd told him and the storm of emotions that accompanied it.

Shepard, in turn, had managed to pull some strings. He didn't know how she'd made it happen, but she'd been able to get him transport back to UNSC Space a little early, along with an assurance that if he needed it, he'd be able to add emergency leave to the not inconsiderable amount of time off he'd racked up during the war.

Which ended up with him wandering the passageways of the transport ship he was on, unable to sleep. The worry and nagging unease that had been his constant companions for the last month, during which he'd heard nothing further from his sister or her unit, though he'd sent her a message telling her he was coming, had joined forces with the memories of dead friends, battles won and lost, and the sheer unfamiliarity of his current situation, to produce nights of troubled sleep, when he slept at all.

Eventually, he found himself in one of the ship's observation rooms that was open to the passengers. Another man, wearing the crew's uniform, was there already, staring out into the absolute blackness of slipspace. He didn't say anything when Nieve stepped up beside him, leaving the two of them to gaze at nothing in perfect, silent accord.

* * *

><p>[14:23 Zulu [07:33 Local] Nov 13, 2652 [Military Calendar]  
>Landing City, Landing County  
>Geart, Epsilon-Phi-03 System]<p>

Habit fought with knowledge as Nieve left the spaceport. Habit told him he should head straight for the small house in the woods just outside of the city, while knowledge suggested that the best place to find out more about his sister would be the Army base adjacent to the spaceport.

Habit won, despite the relative proximity of the base, so Nieve rented one of the ubiquitous warthogs that still dominated ground transport on out of the way colonies and started driving.

He was halfway to the house when he pulled off to the side of the road and got out of the 'hog. No matter how badly his sister had been hurt, he'd already been almost two months coming home, so she could wait just a little bit longer while he did something impulsive.

The shoes he was wearing weren't meant for a walk in the woods, but he didn't hhave far to go so there was no need for him to dig boots out of his bag. The crater in the road had been filled in and paved over years ago, but the burnt, twisted wreck of melted metal that marked where his father died was still there, hidden in the shadows at under the edge of the forest serving as a quiet memorial to a day of blood and fire.

Nieve stopped by the wreck briefly to pay his respects, but it wasn't what he was looking for. He'd already seen others like it, along with hastily repaired damage throughout the city, the marks of a brute raid still bitterly familiar from fourteen years ago and the others he'd seen since then.

He didn't know precicely where his destination was. His memories of the place were fragmented flashes, and he'd been to busy running for his life to pay attention to where he was. It was only after he stumbled on the skeletal remains of a long dead jackal, it's ribs shattered by a hail of buckshot at point blank range, that he knew he was on the right trail.

The HEV pod was still in the impact crater it had made, though time had conspired to topple it from it's precarious upright position. Regardless, Nieve still crawled into the small, claustrophobic space. Something had been using the empty pod as a nest, which drew a small smile from Nieve as he looked at the dimly lit interior.

It was the same as every other pod he'd been in, bare and unadorned, meant only for a death ride to the planet below. At the same time, it was indescribably different, on a far more personal level, even though he'd never seen the inside before.

When he emerged into the forest again, he was quieter, weighed down by the memories the pod and the woods around him held. He stood for a moment, completely still, taking in everything around him, before he sighed quietly and left, knowing that he would never come back to this place again. That he wouldn't need to.

The rest of his drive passed in a blur, until he arrived at the house where he grew up which looked the same as it always had. Even the patchwork repair job from the raid when he was younger now had the same weathered look as the rest of it.

It was a series of prefabricated modules that were connected together, and it had serves as a home for Nieve's family since the first colonists had arrived, well over two centuries ago. It was home. The battered and scarred metal and the fields and forests that surrounded it were Nieve's foundation. It was the one place that was always constant and would always welcome him back, no matter how far or how long he traveled, and no matter where he actually lived.

The door opened as approached, welcoming him inwards. Without hesitation, he stepped across the familiar threshold and felt himself relax in a way he hadn't done since he left to begin basic training years ago. Within the walls of the house, despite what reality, his training, and even his memories would suggest, he was safe.

"Anyone home?" He called. He knew the answer. There had been another 'hog in the driveway and a light on in one of the windows, but it was what he'd always asked when he returned at odd times and his way of announcing that he was back.

"On the porch," came the shouted reply. Sarah didn't acknowledge that it was him, though she would have known his voice instantly, and nothing in the way she spoke suggested that his return was anything special. Then again, he hadn't either. They didn't need to, and neither of them had ever felt like they needed to get emotional to demonstrate how they felt about each other.

"You could have written, you know," Sarah continued, "All I ever got was a message from the Corps saying you'd been injured, and that was years ago. You couldn't have sat down for five minutes and recorded a video saying you were fine?"

The bite in her voice made Nieve smile as he continued through the home. "I see you're doing fine," he replied, "and it's not like you ever sent me anything either. Besides, you know what I do. I doubt the censors would have let one word in five, of either a message or a video, get through."

"Don't give me that bullshit, Jon. You were to busy playing with things that go boom be bothered."

Nieve laughed. "Damn right I was." He stepped out onto the back porch, taking in the view through the transparent walls with a glance before looking at Sarah as she put down a well worn data pad that he recognized as her book collection. She handled the pad in an oddly gentle manner, as if she was still cautious about her own strength. The extra care was understandable, since her left arm was the latest version of the UNSC's standard biomechanical replacement. Her eye left eye was also synthetic and vicious burn scars covered that side of her face, continuing down her neck and into her shirt.

Sarah must have noticed the look on his face as she stood up. "Relax," she said, "it's mostly superficial. The docs say they can fix the scarring, they just don't want to start another round of surgery until they're sure the replacements are properly integrated."

"What the hell happened?"

"What does it look like? A fucking plasma grenade, that's what. The corpsman had to cut my armor out of the skin it fused to on that side, and the arm and eye were obviously a complete loss. It's just luck that my leg didn't get fried too."

Nieve had to shake his head at her nonchalance. She'd had the better part of two months to get used to what had happened, but it was still amazing she was taking it so well. He'd met others who'd never been able to move past what had happened to them, and he was glad his sister wasn't one of them.

The fact that she was alive was as amazing as her attitude. The heat required to melt and fuse the standard issue composite armor despite it's heat resistant gel layers was only generated within the lethal radius of a plasma grenade.

In the end, he just shook his head again and responded in the only way that felt appropriate—he stepped forward and engulfed her in a hug. "It's good to see you again, Sarah."

"You to, Jon."

After a moment he stepped back and rubbed his ribs where her new arm had done it's best to crush them.

"So how long are you back for?" Sarah asked.

"No idea. I'm burning through all the leave I earned on the front lines, and then there's the possibility of emergency leave if you're still having problems then."

The left side of Sarah's face looked like a grotesque mask when she smiled, but the right side lit up and managed to convey enough emotion to make up for it. "You'll go stir crazy within a month." Her smile faded just as quickly as it had appeared. "I'm out on medical, so sooner or later I'll have to find a job, but I'll probably keep living here. It's just as well, I've had enough of the Army anyways. You don't need to worry about me, I'll be fine."

Nieve grinned in reply. "Well, in that case, I'm going to start my time off properly. I'm getting a drink, you want one?"

* * *

><p>[12:40 Zulu [05:50 Local] Dec 13, 2652 [Military Calendar]  
>Landing City, Landing County  
>Geart, Epsilon-Phi-03 System]<p>

Nieve drew in another lungful of air and pushed himself harder. The steady impact of his feet on the ground accelerated as he broke into a sprint and the last hundred yards flew by in a blur before he slowed down to a sudden halt in front of the house.

He opened the door with one hand while the other wiped sweat from his face. Despite knowing that he should spend some time cooling down, all he wanted to do was take a long shower and get something to eat.

Later, after what the UNSC still called a Hollywood shower, though the exact reason for the name had been lost over the centuries, he was sitting down at the kitchen table when Sarah stepped into the room, rubbing at her remaining eye.

"You look like shit." Nieve said. He could see the faint sheen of sweat that still covered her, and when she lowered her hand, the bag under her eye was obvious.

"Good morning to you too, Jon." Sarah sounded surprisingly awake for someone who'd clearly just gotten out of bed. "You're up pretty early, even for you."

Nieve shrugged. Her eyes sharpened, and she looked him over again. "Bad dreams? Me too." He nodded.

She poured a mug of coffee in silence and sat down across from him. "It seems like I loose my arm every night, over and over again. When that doesn't happen, I see what the Brutes and Jackals did to the people they caught. It was… well, you know what it looks like during a raid." She stared down into the mug and continued, very quietly, "How do you manage? Does it ever get better?"

"Sometimes, sometimes not. It depends on the person. If it's really bad, you might want to see a shrink. Time usually helps, though."

"That's it?"

"Yeah."

"But you still have bad nights, don't you? That's why you went running this early, isn't it? You had to work it off somehow."

"The bad nights come and go. I learned to live with them a long time ago, and they're less frequent now. Mostly, I just carry on as best I can and let things fade into the past. I guess I'm lucky in that regard. Not everyone can, and I've seen so much shit in the last few years that none of it really adds to the nightmares anymore."

Sarah sat there, thinking over what he said as her coffee cooled. Eventually she reached a conclusion. "You're going back, aren't you? You still love what you do, even after everything."

They hadn't talked about the future during the month he'd been on planet. They both had known that Sarah wasn't going back to the Army from the extent of her injuries alone and Nieve hadn't needed to think about what he was going to next. As far as he was concerned, there were still battles that needed fighting, even if the war was over, and when the time came to re-enlist further on down the line, he knew that wasn't a choice at all. Sarah had only just realized it from the way he spoke, though, and she looked him straight in the eye while she waited for him to reply.

Nieve me her gaze without flinching. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I am."

* * *

><p>The silence of the void is all encompassing and infinite. But compared to what lay between the two siblings in that moment, it was the lesser silence. Between them was the uneasy silence of a peace that left no peace, the grim silence of a soldier who's work was still unfinished, the soft silence of understanding and above all, the painful silence of answers.<p>

—_**FIN— **_

* * *

><p>AN: Well, that's it. This story is over, after two years of work. They were interesting, eventfully years in real life, though they never really gave me a good enough excuse for the long pauses between updates that you've all dealt with gracefully. (Well, for the most part, anyways.)

_Convergence_ would never have been written without one person specifically, so I thought I'd thank her here. She challenged me, way back at the end of senior year of high school, to actually finish a fic, as opposed to abandoning it to die or leaving it as a one-shot. So I did. It took two years of working in stolen moments, but the fact that I'm writing this bit at all clearly means that I lived up to that challenge. You know who you are, and thank you.

The rest of you deserve my thanks as well. Every review is a major ego boost and one more thing that drags me back to my computer or makes me open a notebook again to keep writing. Sure, "MOAR! I WANT MOAR!" reviews get old, but hey, someone wants to read what I've written, and that means a lot. Even better are reviews that are longer, and best of all are the reviews that take time to make constructive criticisms. I didn't get back to everyone who wrote one of those, but I did talk to most of you, and I learned a few things from most of you. As for the occasional flamers (and really, I didn't have that many), well, there are always going to be jackasses in the world.

Special credit has to go to Hang Tuah, because the conversation one of his early reviews started had a great deal of impact on the story. The questions he asked made me think about things I hadn't thought about before, and they're more or less responsible for the creation of the interludes, since that's where the background details we discussed became visible.

_Convergence_ had its ups and downs, but I'm glad I stuck with it. I know I'm a better writer now then I was when I started, and even if that wasn't true, the experience alone has been worth it. So, once again, thanks to all of you who stuck it out with me.

Finally, I just want to reiterate one last time that there will be no sequel to _Convergence_. I think a fusion of Mass Effect and Halo that continues through the games would be a great story, but I don't have the time or energy to tell it—after all, look at how long it took me to get this far. I think I'll leave that herculean task to someone else. In fact, I probably won't be writing any more fan fiction for a while.

It's been great, people.

-PT246


End file.
